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
wild-card
[wahyld-kahrd] /ˈwaɪldˌkɑrd/
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
Examples from the web for wild card
But the biggest wild card in the diet game may be how you crank out insulin.
With a second wild card playoff berth on its way, there may be slightly more forgiveness in the future.
Wouldn't necessarily name the mystery wild card, but could tell it from the big three.
The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too.
The last hours of the regular season, when the sands ran so quickly on the wild card races.
(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
Word Origin and History for wild card
n.
1927, in figurative sense, from literal use in poker, from wild (adj.) + card (n.). Sports team sense first recorded 1959.
Slang definitions & phrases for wild card
wild card
modifier
: the wild-card slot/ last year's wildcard team
noun phrase
Something outside of the normal rules, category, etc; an unpredictable thing, event, etc: Being from Princeton wasn't like being from Jersey, it was a wild card(1920s+ Card games)
A team picked for a playoff by some more or less arbitrary method, not having won its championship during the season: We can always hope the Lions will be the wild card(1950s+ Sports)
[fr poker and other games, where in some cases one or more wild cards, having any value the player desires, may be designated]
wild card in Technology
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)
Idioms and Phrases with wild card
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.