Thank you for your suggestions. 

I ask students comprehension questions, and ask them to use short answers, and work toward answering in full sentences. The full sentences are for the benefit of the students, to stretch themselves, even though they only need to have one or two specific words to earn the points. I would like for the students to see their entire sentence.

With 119 students on my rosters, I am able to grade some items as essays, but for simple comprehension questions, I am glad to be able to give them some practice that Canvas can auto grade.

In New Quizzes, there is a way to use Regular Expressions to have Canvas look for the one word they need to have to be correct. (Regular Expressions can look for a few variations as well.) I had to do a lot of searching online, but I have found it to be incredibly helpful. I will show what I have figured out below:

If the correct answer should be blue, but the capitalization does not matter, then I use:

(?i)blue

This will accept blue or Blue as correct.

If the correct answer should be Spain, and the capitalization DOES matter, then I put the following in the answer key:

Spain

If the correct answer could have multiple possibilities, then I put:

(?i)(blue|yellow|red)

This will accept blue, Blue, yellow, Yellow, red, and Red.

And finally, I had to get help from my brother who is a software engineer for this one:

If more than one word is needed, regardless of the order they are used:

^(?=.*\bred\b)(?=.*\byellow\b).*$

This will accept red and yellow, regardless of the order.