carriage return
carriage return noun: on a typewriter or computer printer, the action that returns it to the beginning of the next line.
Noun
carriage return (plural carriage returns)
- On a typewriter or computer printer, the action that returns it to the beginning of the next line.
- 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).
- […] 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.1998, Jeff Frentzen, Henry Sobotka, Dewayne McNair, JavaScript Annotated Archives, page 28
- The key or lever that initiates the carriage return action (on a typewriter) or generates the carriage return character (on a computer).
Forms of carriage return
| plural | carriage returns |
|---|
Questions about carriage return
- What does carriage return mean?
- Carriage return means on a typewriter or computer printer, the action that returns it to the beginning of the next line.
- What part of speech is carriage return?
- Carriage return is a noun.
- What is the plural of carriage return?
- The plural of carriage return is carriage returns.
Words near carriage return in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: carriage return (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “carriage return.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/carriage_return. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.