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escape

Pronunciation: /ɪˈskeɪp/

The English word “escape” has 20 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. To get free; to free oneself.
  2. To break out of confinement.
  3. To avoid (any unpleasant person or thing); to elude, get away from.
  4. To avoid capture; to get away with something, avoid punishment.
  5. To avoid responsibilities and stresses for a time.
  6. To be forgotten by.
  7. To elude the observation or notice of; to not be seen or remembered by.
  8. 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.
  9. To halt a program or command by pressing a key (such as the "Esc" key) or combination of keys.
  10. To grow wild, instead of in a cultivated area.
  11. To express, especially involuntarily.

noun

  1. The act of leaving a dangerous or unpleasant situation.
  2. Leakage or outflow, as of steam or a liquid, or an electric current through defective insulation.
  3. Something that has escaped; an escapee.
  4. A holiday, viewed as time away from the vicissitudes of life.
  5. escape key
  6. The text character represented by 27 (decimal) or 1B (hexadecimal).
  7. A successful shot from a snooker position.
  8. A defective product that is allowed to leave a manufacturing facility.
  9. That which escapes attention or restraint; a mistake, oversight, or transgression.

Etymology

From Middle English escapen, from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French escaper ( = Old French eschaper, modern French échapper), from Vulgar Latin *excappāre (“to escape a garment, get out of one's clothing”, literally “to free oneself from one's cape”), from Latin ex- (“out”) + Late Latin cappa (“cape, cloak”). Cognate with escapade. Also doublet of scape.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.