Wildcard

How to spell wildcard

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wildcard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wildcard mean?

1. nounA person or thing whose behaviour or effect cannot be reliably predicted.
2. nounA place in a competition given to a player or team that did not qualify through the normal route.
3. nounA symbol, such as an asterisk, that stands in for any character or set of characters in a search.
4. nounA playing card that the holder may assign any value or suit.

Wildcard in a sentence

• The new supplier is a wildcard that could disrupt the whole schedule.

• The injured champion received a wildcard for the tournament.

• Type an asterisk as a wildcard to match every file in the folder.

• In this version of the game the joker acts as a wildcard.

• Weather remains the wildcard in any outdoor event budget.

• The organisers handed a wildcard to a promising local teenager.

Where does wildcard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent modern compound joining two old words, 'wild' and 'card'. 'Wild' descends from the Old English 'wilde', meaning untamed or uncultivated, a word shared across the Germanic languages. 'Card' arrived in English in the 1400s from the Old French 'carte', which came from the Latin 'charta' and ultimately the Greek 'khartes', meaning a leaf of papyrus or a sheet for writing. The two were welded together in the world of card games, where a 'wild card' is one that the holder may freely assign any value, a usage recorded from the late nineteenth century. From there the meaning radiated outward: in the twentieth century sport adopted it for a competitor admitted without going through the usual qualifying rounds, and computing borrowed it for a symbol such as the asterisk that stands in for any character. The spelling itself holds no real trap; the only question writers face is whether to set it as one word, two words, or with a hyphen, and the solid one-word form is now the most common.

How the word is built

• wild (uncontrolled, unrestricted)
• card (a playing card; by extension a token or symbol)