| escape character (\) |
| Definition - One of the many names for the \ symbol. |
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Etymology - The term escape character arose from the field of computing science in the latter half of the 20th century. In that field, it denotes a code used to indicate that subsequence characters should be interpreted differently. |
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Oxford English Dictionary - The phrase's first citation is from 1962: "*Escape character, a character used to indicate that the digit which follows is to be interpreted as belonging to a different alphabet." (Gloss. Terms Automatic Data Processing (B.S.I.) 15) |
