Esc key

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Invention

Domain

Science and technology

Knowledge cost

2

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

On computer keyboards, the Esc key Esc (named Escape key in the international standard series ISO/IEC 9995) is a key used to generate the escape character (which can be represented as ASCII code 27 in decimal, Unicode U+001B, or Ctrl+[). The escape character, when sent from the keyboard to a computer, often is interpreted by software as "stop", "cancel" or "exit", and when sent from the computer to an external device (including many printers since the 1980s, computer terminals and Linux consoles, for example) marks the beginning of an escape sequence to specify operating modes or characteristics generally.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Esc key”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Peter Shanks from Hobart, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.