carriage return

carriage return (plural carriage returns)

1. On a typewriter or computer printer, the action that returns it to the beginning of the next line.
2. (computing) The control character (0x0D in ASCII, abbreviated as CR) that originally signaled a device to perform a carriage return, but now merely indicates the end of a line of text (newline).

   Synonym: \r

   • 1998, Jeff Frentzen, Henry Sobotka, Dewayne McNair, JavaScript Annotated Archives, page 28:

     […] but it also reduces the likelihood of the "unterminated string literal" error message that can easily occur for seemingly trivial reasons when you're working with long strings — an accidental carriage return or a misnested quotation mark is all it takes.

3. The key or lever that initiates the carriage return action (on a typewriter) or generates the carriage return character (on a computer).

   Hyponyms: hard return, soft return

• enter
• EOL
• line feed
• return