wild card

Or wild·card

[wahyld-kahrd]

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. Sports.,  an unranked or unproven player or team that is allowed to enter a tournament after regularly qualifying competitors have been selected.

   The committee added several retired champions as wild cards in the tennis championships.

4. Digital Technology.,  a symbol in a search parameter, usually the asterisk or question mark, that will retrieve all results for another character or other characters in its position.

   The file search is case-sensitive, and wildcards are not supported.

wild card

noun

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of wild card¹

First recorded in 1530–40

Idioms and Phrases

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.

Example Sentences

It was more of the same during the Dodgers’ sweep of the Cincinnati Reds in the wild card round last week.

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And, since the best-of-three wild card format was introduced in 2022, all 12 teams that have won Game 1 have gone on to win the series.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

And three weeks later, he will start behind the plate for the Dodgers in Game 1 of their National League wild card series against the Cincinnati Reds on Tuesday night.

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The decision to leave Kershaw off the wild card roster isn’t shocking.

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This year will be the Dodgers’ first time playing in the new wild card round, after they secured byes to the division series in each of the past three seasons.

Read more on Los Angeles Times