escape

verb

1. (intransitive)To get free; to free oneself.

   “The prisoners escaped by jumping over a wall.”

   “The factory was evacuated after toxic gases escaped from a pipe.”

2. (transitive)To avoid (any unpleasant person or thing); to elude, get away from.

   “He only got a fine and so escaped going to jail.”

   “The children climbed out of the window to escape the fire.”

   “sailors that escaped the wreck”

   “In the Southern Region of British Railways, most of the damage was caused by earthslips which blocked one or both roads. Obstructions occurred at 21 places in the London Eastern District, and at 18 places in London Central District. On the other hand, the London Western District escaped comparatively lightly.”

   “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.”

3. (intransitive)To avoid capture; to get away with something, avoid punishment.

   “Luckily, I escaped with only a fine.”

4. (transitive)To elude the observation or notice of; to not be seen or remembered by.

   “The name of the hotel escapes me at present.”

   “The detective examined the crime scene, but one clue escaped his notice.”

   “c. 1698-1699 (year published) Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs They escaped the search of the enemy.”

   “Quite why a passenger from Reading would choose to reach London via Guildford rather than using Great Western Railway's frequent and fast direct services escapes me - […].”

5. (transitive)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.

   “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.”

   “If the data for a URI component would conflict with the reserved purpose, then the conflicting data must be escaped before forming the URI.”

   “Character Data tags allow you to place complex strings as the text of an element—without the need to manually escape the string.”

   “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.”

6. To halt a program or command by pressing a key (such as the "Esc" key) or combination of keys.

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The act of leaving a dangerous or unpleasant situation.

   “The prisoners made their escape by digging a tunnel.”

2. (countable, uncountable)Leakage or outflow, as of steam or a liquid, or an electric current through defective insulation.
3. (countable, uncountable)Something that has escaped; an escapee.

   “But what about the flocks of Waxbills? Are they escapes gone feral, or are they spreading from Africa?”

4. (countable, uncountable)A holiday, viewed as time away from the vicissitudes of life.
5. (countable, uncountable)escape key
6. (countable, uncountable)The text character represented by 27 (decimal) or 1B (hexadecimal).

   “You forgot to insert an escape in the datastream.”

7. (countable, uncountable)A successful shot from a snooker position.
8. (countable, uncountable)A defective product that is allowed to leave a manufacturing facility.
9. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)That which escapes attention or restraint; a mistake, oversight, or transgression.

   “I should have been more accurate, corrected all those former escapes.”

10. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)A sally.

    “thousand escapes of wit”

11. (countable, uncountable)An apophyge.
12. (countable, uncountable)A cultivated plant found growing as though wild, dispersed by some agency.