How to do whole-word search similar to “grep -w” in Vim

Question

How do I do a whole-word search like grep -w in Vim, which returns only lines where the sought-for string is a whole word and not part of a larger word?

Answer 1

One can use 'very-magic' \v to simplify the command:

/\v

As mentioned in comments, \v indicates that all alphanumeric characters have special meaning hence one needs to enter only < and > rather than escaping them with \< and \>.