wildcard

See also: wild card, and wild-card

English

Etymology

From wild +‎ card.

Pronunciation

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Noun

wildcard (plural wildcards)

1. (computing) A character that takes the place of any other character or string that is not known or specified.
   • 1968, Digital Equipment Corporation, VAX/VMS 319(5864), page 751, Section 2.1.2 Using Wildcard Characters

     A wildcard character is a symbol that you can use with many DCL commands to apply the command to several files at once, rather than specifying each file individually.

   If the character * is acting as a wildcard, then the pattern a*m matches each of the words amalgam, atom and alum.

2. (also written wild card) An uncontrolled or unpredictable element.
   • 2008 February 8, Eli Kintisch, “From Gasoline Alleys to Electric Avenues”, in Science‎^[1], 319(5864), page 751:

     There are several technical wildcards, such as how the larger battery packs--four times larger than those of the Prius--will withstand the rigors of city driving, […]

3. (also written wild card) An element, often deliberately concealed, which is withheld for contingency.
4. (sports, card games) Alternative form of wild card.
   • 2011 June 28, Piers Newbery, “Wimbledon 2011: Sabine Lisicki beats Marion Bartoli”, in BBC Sport‎^[2]:

     German wildcard Sabine Lisicki conquered her nerves to defeat France's Marion Bartoli and take her amazing Wimbledon run into the semi-finals.

5. (phonetics, phonology) A letter or symbol that substitutes for a generic or poorly identified sound, for example capital C for any or some consonant, or capital V for any or some vowel.

Usage notes

• A wild card in card games is usually written as two separate words. The computing term is usually written as one compound word.

Translations

special character

• Armenian: please add this translation if you can
• Bulgarian: please add this translation if you can
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 通配符 (tōngpèifú)

• Dutch: jokerteken n
• Esperanto: ĵokero
• Finnish: jokerimerkki
• French: joker (fr)
• German: Platzhalter (de)
• Greek: χαρακτήρας μπαλαντέρ m (charaktíras balantér)
• Hebrew: please add this translation if you can
• Hungarian: helyettesítő karakter
• Icelandic: algildistákn n
• Japanese: ワイルドカード (wairudokādo)
• Korean: 와일드카드 (waildeukadeu)
• Persian: چمنویسه, نویسه جانشین (fa)
• Polish: wieloznacznik m
• Portuguese: coringa (pt) m, curinga (pt) m
• Romanian: joker (ro) m, wildcard n
• Russian: знак подстано́вки (znak podstanóvki), шабло́н (ru) m (šablón) (derived adjective may be used in phrases), си́мвол-джо́кер m (símvol-džóker)
• Spanish: comodín (es)
• Swedish: jokertecken (sv) n
• Thai: please add this translation if you can

uncontrolled or unpredictable element

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 未知数 (zh) (wèizhīshù)

• Finnish: kysymysmerkki (fi), avoin kysymys
• Greek: μπαλαντέρ (el) m (balantér)
• Persian: چموش (fa), زیرسبیلی

Verb

wildcard (third-person singular simple present wildcards, present participle wildcarding, simple past and past participle wildcarded)

1. (computing) To replace or supplement with a wildcard character to allow matching against a range of possible values.
   • 2002, Eric Van der Vlist, XML Schema, page 183:

     The unfortunate consequence is that document elements cannot be wildcarded because a schema needs to provide a closed list of possible document elements.

Spanish

Noun

wildcard m (plural wildcards)

1. wildcard