/(?![a-z]+:)/
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the
/are delimiters.?!is negative lookahead.[a-z]is a character class (any character in the a-z range)+is one-or-more times of the preceding pattern ([a-z]in this case):is just the colon literalIt roughly means “look ahead and make sure there are no alpha characters followed by a colon”.
This regex would make more sense if it had a start of string anchor:
/^(?![a-z]+:/, so it wouldn’t matchabc:(like one of the other answers say), but without the (^) I don’t know how useful this is.