Select from any of multiple values from a Postgres field

Question

I've got a table that resembles the following:

WORD    WEIGHT   WORDTYPE
a       0.3      common
the     0.3      common
gray    1.2      colors
steeple 2        object

I need to pull the weights for several different words out of the database at once. I could do:

SELECT * FROM word_weight WHERE WORD = 'a' OR WORD = 'steeple' OR WORD='the';

but it feels ugly and the code to generate the query is obnoxious. I'm hoping that there's a way I can do something like (pseudocode):

SELECT * FROM word_weight WHERE WORD = 'a','the';

Answer 1

You are describing the functionality of the in clause.

select * from word_weight where word in ('a', 'steeple', 'the');