Word.ws English Dictionary

carriage returns

carriage returns is the plural of carriage return.

Meaning of carriage return

Noun

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

Questions about carriage returns

What is carriage returns the plural of?
Carriage returns is the plural of carriage return.

Words near carriage returns in the dictionary

  1. carriage houses
  2. Carriage Paid To
  3. carriage pole
  4. carriage poles
  5. carriage return
  6. carriage returns
  7. carriage spring
  8. carriage springs
  9. carriage trade
  10. carriageable
  11. carriagebuilder

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: carriage returns (page history and authors); 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 returns.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/carriage_returns. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.