In computer (software) technology, a wildcard character can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. The asterisk (*) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any zero or more characters, and the question mark (?) usually substitutes as a wildcard character for any one character, as in the CP/M, DOS, Microsoft Windows and POSIX (Unix) shells. (In Unix this is referred to as glob expansion.) In SQL, the wildcard characters are percent (%) for zero or more characters, and underscore (_) for one character. In many regular expression implementations, the period (.) is the wildcard character for a single character.

a character which can be appended to the root of a word so that you can search for all possible endings

a mark that tells the search engine to look for any words or numbers that include the letters and numbers indicated, plus others

a special character that can be appended to the root of a word in order to search for all possible words endings simultaneously

a special character that creates a search pattern that can match several different potential target strings of text

character A character which specifies that "anything" could go in its place. A character used to specify a whole category of items.

Placeholder for one (symbol: ?) or more (symbol: *) characters. These are parts of regular expressions.

A special character or character sequence which matches any character in a string comparison.

A symbol used in searching to represent one or more letters. It is most often used to find plurals and other variants of words. Commonly used symbols include "?" "*" and "+". See also truncation.

In a query, a symbol that replaces a portion of a word to indicate that other word constructions are applicable.

See truncation, asterisk

a symbol used to leave out a letter in the middle of a word, to allow for alternative spellings or for some plural forms

A special character provided by an operating system or a particular program that is used to identify a group of files or directories with a similar characteristic. Useful if you want to perform the same operation simultaneously on more than one file. Example: the asterisk (*) that can be used in DOS to specify a groups of files such as *.txt.

symbol used in command or search instructions to stand for a range of characters. Thus, a question mark is used to stand for ‘any single character’, while an asterisk is used to mean any character or group of characters or none.