- a card having its value decided by the wishes of the players.
- a determining or important person or thing whose qualities are unknown, indeterminate, or unpredictable: In a sailboat race the weather is the wild card.
- 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.
- 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.
- See wild (def. 14)
- 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
- an unpredictable element in a situation
- a symbol that can represent any character or group of characters, as in a filename
