Fromwild +card.
wildcard (pluralwildcards)
- (computing) Acharacter that takes the place of any other character orstring that is notknown orspecified.
- 1968,Digital Equipment Corporation,VAX/VMS 319(5864), page 751, Section 2.1.2 Using Wildcard Characters
- Awildcard 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 awildcard, then the patterna*m matches each of the wordsamalgam,atom andalum.
- (also writtenwild card) Anuncontrolled orunpredictableelement.
2008 February 8, Eli Kintisch, “From Gasoline Alleys to Electric Avenues”, inScience[1],319(5864), page 751:There are several technicalwildcards, such as how the larger battery packs--four times larger than those of the Prius--will withstand the rigors of city driving,[…]
- (also writtenwild card) An element, oftendeliberatelyconcealed, which iswithheld forcontingency.
- (sports, card games)Alternative form ofwild card.
2011 June 28, Piers Newbery, “Wimbledon 2011: Sabine Lisicki beats Marion Bartoli”, inBBC Sport[2]:Germanwildcard Sabine Lisicki conquered her nerves to defeat France's Marion Bartoli and take her amazing Wimbledon run into the semi-finals.
- (phonetics, phonology) A letter or symbol that substitutes for a generic or poorly identified sound, for example capitalC for any or some consonant, or capitalV for any or some vowel.
- Awild card in card games is usually written as two separate words. The computing term is usually written as one compound word.
uncontrolled or unpredictable element
wildcard (third-person singular simple presentwildcards,present participlewildcarding,simple past and past participlewildcarded)
- (computing) To replace or supplement with awildcard character to allowmatching against a range of possible values.
2002, Eric Van der Vlist,XML Schema, page183:The unfortunate consequence is that document elements cannot bewildcarded because a schema needs to provide a closed list of possible document elements.
wildcard m (pluralwildcards)
- wildcard
