escaped

Escaped is the past tense and past participle of the verb escape. It describes someone or something that has freed itself from confinement, danger, or pursuit, or that has avoided danger. Used as an adjective, escaped can refer to a person who is now free, such as an escaped prisoner, or to a thing that has gotten away, for example an escaped animal.

Etymology: the word comes from Old French eschapper, via Middle English eschapen, with roots common to other Romance-language terms for slipping away. The sense of breaking free or avoiding capture has been part of its meaning for many centuries.

In computing and data formats, the term escape appears in escape characters and escape sequences. An escape character precedes another character to remove or alter its special meaning, allowing representation of characters that would otherwise be difficult to include. Common examples include the backslash followed by a letter to denote a control character, such as \n for newline or \t for tab; in many languages and data formats, quotes or backslashes themselves are escaped (for instance, a JSON string may contain an escaped quote represented as \").