Wild Card or Wildcard
Wild Card or Wildcard :
In a question-answer dialogue which aims not to be over-sensitive about spelling, the teacher may decide to allow for aberrations by declaring certain characters "wild". For example, the answer "relitivaty" would match with 'r?l?t?v?t?', the question marks representing wild card characters: i.e. whatever the learner types in place of them is accepted. Conventionally, a question mark is used for a single character and an asterisk for a string of characters. A technique also used in programs that help you cheat at crossword puzzles! Wildcards can also be used in search engines such as Google when you are not sure of the spelling of the item you are searching for. See Section 4, Module 1.5, headed Search engines: How to find materials on the Web
