The official name is a "glob" pattern. According to Wikipedia, the term originally was the name of a program (/etc/glob) which in the comments called itself "global command". It stems from an early versions of unix.
Wikipedia has a more information, including a link to the original source. The top of the original source contains this comment:
/* global command --
"*" in params matches r.e ".*"
"?" in params matches r.e. "."
"[...]" in params matches character class
"[...a-z...]" in params matches a through z.
perform command with argument list
constructed as follows:
if param does not contain "*", "[", or "?", use it as is
if it does, find all files in current directory
which match the param, sort them, and use them
prepend the command name with "/bin" or "/usr/bin"
For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)