Measuring the similarity of integral curves is fundamental to many important flow data analysis and visualization tasks such as feature detection, pattern querying, streamline clustering, and hierarchical exploration. In this paper, we introduce FlowString, a novel vocabulary approach that extracts shape invariant features from streamlines and utilizes a string-based method for exploratory streamline analysis and visualization. Our solution first resamples streamlines by considering their local feature scales. We then classify resampled points along streamlines based on the shape similarity around their local neighborhoods. We encode each streamline into a string of well-selected shape characters, from which we construct meaningful words for querying and retrieval. A unique feature of our approach is that it captures intrinsic streamline similarity that is invariant under translation, rotation and scaling. We design an intuitive interface and user interactions to support flexible querying, allowing exact and approximate searches for partial streamline matching. Users can perform queries at either the character level or the word level, and define their own characters or words conveniently for customized search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FlowString with several flow field data sets of different sizes and characteristics. We also extend FlowString to handle multiple data sets and perform an empirical expert evaluation to confirm the usefulness of this approach.