wild card
Use Wild card in a sentencewild card
noun
1.
Cards. a card having its value decided by the wishes of the players.
2.
a determining or important person or thing whose qualities are unknown, indeterminate, or unpredictable: In a sailboat race the weather is the wild card.
3.
Tennis. a player, usually without ranking, who is allowed to enter a tournament at the discretion of the tournament committee after regularly qualifying competitors have been selected.
Origin:
1530–40
1530–40
Dictionary.com Unabridged
adjective
1.
of, constituting, or including a wild card.
2.
Informal. of, being, or including an unpredictable or unproven element, person, item, etc.
3.
Sports. of, being, or including an unseeded or unproven participant or team, as a team in a championship tournament that has not placed first in its league or area.
Origin:
1955–60
1955–60
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
Cite This Source
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Link To wild card
00:10
Wild card
is always a great word to know.
So is interrobang. Does it mean:
| a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
Collins
World English Dictionary
| wild card | |
| —n | |
| 1. | See wild |
| 2. | sport a player or team that has not qualified for a competition but is allowed to take part, at the organizers' discretion, after all the regular places have been taken |
| 3. | an unpredictable element in a situation |
| 4. | computing a symbol that can represent any character or group of characters, as in a filename |
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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FOLDOC
Computing Dictionary
wild card definition
operating system, programming, text(From card games in which certain cards, often the joker, can act as any other card) A special character or character sequence which matches any character in a string comparison, like ellipsis ("...") in ordinary written text.
In Unix filenames '?' matches any single character and '*' matches any zero or more characters. In regular expressions, '.' matches any one character and "[...]" matches any one of the enclosed characters.
See also Backus-Naur Form.
(1997-07-16)
American Heritage
Idioms & Phrases
wild card
An unpredictable person or event, as in Don't count on his support
he's a wild card, or A traffic jam? That's a wild card we didn't expect. This expression comes from card games, especially poker, where it refers to a card that can stand for any rank chosen by the player who holds it. The term was adopted in sports for an additional player or team chosen to take part in a contest after the regular places have been taken. It is also used in computer terminology for a symbol that stands for one or more characters in searches for files that share a common specification. Its figurative use dates from the mid-1900s.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
Cite This Source
Example sentences
Wouldn't necessarily name the mystery wild card, but could tell it from the big three.
The last hours of the regular season, when the sands ran so quickly on the wild card races.
With a second wild card playoff berth on its way, there may be slightly more forgiveness in the future.
The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too.
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