wildcard * in CSS for classes

What you need is called attribute selector. An example, using your html structure, is the following:

div[class^="tocolor-"], div[class*=" tocolor-"] {
    color:red 
}

In the place of div you can add any element or remove it altogether, and in the place of class you can add any attribute of the specified element.

[class^="tocolor-"] — starts with "tocolor-".
[class*=" tocolor-"] — contains the substring "tocolor-" occurring directly after a space character.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/K3693/1/

More information on CSS attribute selectors, you can find here and here. And from MDN Docs MDN Docs

Yes you can do this.

*[id^='term-']{
    [css here]
}

This will select all ids that start with 'term-'.

As for the reason for not doing this, I see where it would be preferable to select this way; as for style, I wouldn't do it myself, but it's possible.

An alternative solution:

div[class|='tocolor'] will match for values of the "class" attribute that begin with "tocolor-", including "tocolor-1", "tocolor-2", etc.

Beware that this won't match

<div class="foo tocolor-">

Reference: https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#attribute-representation

[att|=val]

Represents an element with the att attribute, its value either being exactly "val" or beginning with "val" immediately followed by "-" (U+002D)

If you don't need the unique identifier for further styling of the divs and are using HTML5 you could try and go with custom Data Attributes. Read on here or try a google search for HTML5 Custom Data Attributes