diff --git a/spacy/tokenizer.pyx b/spacy/tokenizer.pyx
index 7fcff8d30..15a5f7274 100644
--- a/spacy/tokenizer.pyx
+++ b/spacy/tokenizer.pyx
@@ -407,7 +407,7 @@ cdef class Tokenizer:
         if data.get('infix_finditer'):
             self.infix_finditer = re.compile(data['infix_finditer']).finditer
         if data.get('token_match'):
-            self.token_match = re.compile(data['token_match']).search
+            self.token_match = re.compile(data['token_match']).match
         for string, substrings in data.get('rules', {}).items():
             self.add_special_case(string, substrings)
         return self