Meaning
An unpredictable or unquantified person, thing or factor whose behaviour cannot be forecast and that could change how a situation turns out. Also retains literal senses: a playing card allowed to stand for any other card, and in sport a competitor or team admitted to a competition without qualifying by the standard route. Neutral to playful; especially common in sport, politics and business commentary. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The term comes from card games such as poker, in which a designated card, often a joker or the deuces, may stand for any other card. Merriam-Webster documents use in the first half of the twentieth century, including a 1928 citation and a 1941 Life magazine description of poker games in which deuces were wild. From cards the word was extended to other fields: in sport it denotes a contestant or team that enters a tournament without the usual qualification, and figurative uses built on card-game turns of phrase, such as playing the wild card, appear from the 1940s. In baseball, for example, Major League Baseball adopted a wild card berth with its 1994 realignment, first contested in 1995. The general sense of an unknown quantity, and the related computing sense of a character that matches any other, developed through the later twentieth century.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a bit of a wild card
- play the wild card
- wild card
- wild-card entry
- wildcard
Usage Examples
- The youngest candidate is the wild card in this election; nobody can predict where her support will go.
- Late snow is always a wild card in the spring planting schedule.
- He has been a wildcard all season, beating champions one week and losing to newcomers the next.