Metacharacter
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A character used to signify something other than its literal form, such as the asterisk when used as a wildcard.
"This chapter moves on to look at several regular expression metacharacters and modifiers. Metacharacters can be combined with literal characters and quantifiers, which were discussed in Chapter 3, to create more complex regular expression patterns."
Example
More examples"This chapter moves on to look at several regular expression metacharacters and modifiers. Metacharacters can be combined with literal characters and quantifiers, which were discussed in Chapter 3, to create more complex regular expression patterns."
Etymology
From meta- + character.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.