wild card

American  

[wahyld-kahrd] / ˈwaɪldˌkɑrd /

Or wildcard

noun

wild cards plural

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.

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wild card British  

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

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wild card Idioms  

1. 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.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• wild cards
  plural

Etymology

Origin of wild card

First recorded in 1530–40

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

wild card

And then there’s the wild card: interest-rate differentials.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 2, 2026

Not Williams’s layoff, not the comeback, not the Super Bowl-style fuss, and certainly not Williams’s decision to accept a wild card to return to singles at Wimbledon.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 30, 2026

Serena Williams’ comeback is in full swing, with the 23-time Grand Slam champion announced as a wild card entry for Wimbledon in women’s singles.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 26, 2026

Once Williams committed to playing doubles, Wimbledon all but dangled a singles wild card in front of Williams’s face.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 22, 2026

“Hey,” I blurt out, looking over at Ziggy, who is cheering on a wild card drafted by the Stormchasers.

From "Warcross" by Marie Lu