diff --git a/src/wp-includes/query.php b/src/wp-includes/query.php
index a9300329d1..3e56e59a97 100644
--- a/src/wp-includes/query.php
+++ b/src/wp-includes/query.php
@@ -1987,7 +1987,7 @@ class WP_Query {
 				$term = trim( $term, "\"' " );
 
 			// \p{L} matches a single letter that is not a Chinese, Japanese, etc. char
-			if ( ! $term || preg_match( '/^\p{L}$/u', $term ) )
+			if ( ! $term || @preg_match( '/^\p{L}$/u', $term ) )
 				continue;
 
 			if ( in_array( call_user_func( $strtolower, $term ), $stopwords, true ) )