• Escape

    Pronunciation

    • IPA: /ɪˈskeɪp/, /əˈskeɪp/, /ɛˈskeɪp/
    • Rhymes: -eɪp

    Origin

    From Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French escaper ( = Old French eschaper, modern French échapper), from Vulgar Latin *excappāre, from Latin ex- ("out") + capio ("capture").

    Full definition of escape

    Verb

    1. (intransitive) To get free, to free oneself.
      • 2013-06-07, David Simpson, Fantasy of navigation, It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in the basket a balloon: perhaps out of a desire to escape the gravity of this world or to get a preview of the next; ….
    2. The prisoners escaped by jumping over a wall.
    3. (transitive) To avoid (any unpleasant person or thing); to elude, get away from.
      • Shakespearesailors that escaped the wreck
      • 2011, March 1, Phil McNulty, Chelsea 2-1 Man Utd, Luiz was Chelsea's stand-out performer, although Ferguson also had a case when he questioned how the £21m defender escaped a red card after the break for a hack at Rooney, with the Brazilian having already been booked.
    4. He only got a fine and so escaped going to jail.
      The children climbed out of the window to escape the fire.
    5. (intransitive) To avoid capture; to get away with something, avoid punishment.
      Luckily, I escaped with only a fine.
    6. (transitive) To elude the observation or notice of; to not be seen or remembered by.
      The name of the hotel escapes me at present.
      • LudlowThey escaped the search of the enemy.
    7. (transitive, computing) To cause (a single character, or all such characters in a string) to be interpreted literally, instead of with any special meaning it would usually have in the same context, often by prefixing with another character.
      • 1998 August, Tim Berners-Lee et al., Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax (RFC 2396), page 8:If the data for a URI component would conflict with the reserved purpose, then the conflicting data must be escaped before forming the URI.
      • 2002, Scott Worley, Inside ASP.NET Chapter Using XML in ASP.NET Applications, Character Data tags allow you to place complex strings as the text of an element—without the need to manually escape the string.
      • 2007, Michael Cross, Developer's Guide to Web Application Security Chapter Code Auditing and Reverse Engineering, Therefore, what follows is a list of typical output functions; your job is to determine if any of the functions print out tainted data that has not been passed through some sort of HTML escaping function.
    8. When using the "bash" shell, you can escape the ampersand character with a backslash.
      Brion escaped the double quote character on Windows by adding a second double quote within the literal.
    9. (computing) To halt a program or command by pressing a key (such as the "Esc" key) or combination of keys.

    Usage notes

    In senses 2. and 3. this is a catenative verb that takes the gerund (-ing). See

    Derived terms

    Noun

    escape

    (plural escapes)
    1. The act of leaving a dangerous or unpleasant situation.The prisoners made their escape by digging a tunnel.
    2. (computing) escape key
    3. (programming) The text character represented by 27 (decimal) or 1B (hexadecimal).You forgot to insert an escape in the datastream.
    4. (snooker) A successful shot from a snooker position.
    5. (manufacturing) A defective product that is allowed to leave a manufacturing facility.
    6. (obsolete) That which escapes attention or restraint; a mistake, oversight, or transgression.
      • BurtonI should have been more accurate, and corrected all those former escapes.
    7. Leakage or outflow, as of steam or a liquid, or an electric current through defective insulation.
    8. (obsolete) A sally.
      • Shakespearethousand escapes of wit
    9. (architecture) An apophyge.

    Anagrams

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