wild card

noun

1

: an unknown or unpredictable factor

2

: one picked to fill a leftover playoff or tournament berth after regularly qualifying competitors have all been determined

3

usually wildcard

ˈwī(-ə)l(d)-ˌkärd 

: a symbol (such as ? or *) used in a keyword database search to represent the presence of zero, one, or more than one unspecified characters

Examples of wild card in a Sentence

The joker is a wild card.

Taxes are the wild card in this election.

The team made it into the play-offs as the wild card.

Recent Examples on the Web

That might come to pass, but my prediction represents something like the best-case scenario — Arizona is poised to be feisty and Seattle is perhaps the league’s biggest wild card in 2024. —Dieter Kurtenbach, The Mercury News, 18 May 2024

But the entrance of Harry Dunn created another wild card. —Lia Russell, Baltimore Sun, 14 May 2024

Word History

Etymology

wild card, playing card with arbitrarily determined value

First Known Use

1971, in the meaning defined at sense 1