This paper describes Fuzzy Query By Example, an approach helping users retrieve data without any prior knowledge of the database schema or any formal querying language. The user is solicited to evaluate, in a binary way, pre-selected items of the database. We provide a characterization-based strategy that identifies the properties shared by the examples (resp. counterexamples) positively (resp. negatively) evaluated by the user. These properties are expressed using linguistic terms from a fuzzy vocabulary to ensure that the user has a good understanding of the inferred query.