Search for “whole word match” with SQL Server LIKE pattern

Full text indexes is the answer.

The poor cousin alternative is

'.' + column + '.' LIKE '%[^a-z]pit[^a-z]%'

FYI unless you are using _CS collation, there is no need for a-zA-Z

you can just use below condition for whitespace delimiters:

(' '+YOUR_FIELD_NAME+' ') like '% doc %'

it works faster and better than other solutions. so in your case it works fine with "a pit of despair" or "pit your wits" or "a pit" or "a pit." or just "pit", but not works for "pit!".