expressions and wordforms not working as thought

Hi,

I want to have the phrase driving licence, rewritten to licence, eg in wordforms or exceptions…

driving licence => licence (have also tried just > instead of =>)

However, when a user searches on “driving” I won’t want them to be able to find that match.

I’ve tried adding the above to wordforms but it doesn’t work (other general aliases do though, so I know the file works fine). But I was a bit unsure if that would block driving from still working, as it’s already tokenized ?

So I thought in that case, it would need to be an exceptions, as that happens before tokenization ?

However, that didn’t work either, and driving still matches on driving licence.

Am I misunderstanding exceptions here ? Is there a way to achieve what I’m after (other than regex substitute the source text before it’s ever seen in indexing)?

I don’t have index_exact_words set, and am reindexing/restarting the server

Many thanks.