Escapes

Escapes is the plural of escape, referring to the act of breaking free from confinement, danger, or restriction. The term is used across many fields to describe both literal and metaphorical evasion or removal.

In emergency planning, escape refers to finding a way out of danger. Buildings and transport systems use clearly marked escape routes, exits, and signage to enable safe egress during fires or other emergencies. The concept also appears in historical records on prison or captivity escapes, used to study security and human behavior while avoiding endorsing wrongdoing.

In computing and text processing, an escape character signals that the following character should be treated specially. Escape sequences appear in string literals to represent characters that would be difficult to include directly, such as newline or quotation marks. In many languages the backslash serves as the escape character, producing sequences like \n or \t; in terminals, ANSI escape codes control color and cursor movement.

The Esc key on keyboards is labeled Escape and is commonly used to cancel dialogs or exit modes.

In entertainment, escape rooms are live puzzle games where teams solve clues to escape a themed room within a time limit. In narrative contexts, escapes can be narrative devices depicting characters breaking free from danger or confinement.

In biology, escape behavior describes rapid motion or avoidance responses that help animals avoid predators.