WordWeb Online

1. Having broken free from confinement, capture, control, etc.
   "searching for two escaped prisoners";
   - at large, loose, on the loose

1. Run away from confinement
   "The convicted murderer escaped from a high security prison";
   - get away, break loose
    
2. Fail to experience
   "Fortunately, I escaped the hurricane";
   - miss
    
3. Escape potentially unpleasant consequences; get away with a forbidden action
   "She escapes with murder!";
   - get off [informal], get away, get by, get out
    
4. Be incomprehensible to; escape understanding by
   "What you are seeing in him escapes me";
   - elude
    
5. Remove oneself from a familiar environment, usually for pleasure or diversion
   "We escaped to our summer house for a few days";
   - get away
    
6. Flee; take to one's heels; cut and run
   "The burglars escaped before the police showed up";
   - scat [informal], run, scarper [Brit, informal], turn tail [informal], lam [N. Amer, informal], run away, hightail it [N. Amer, informal], bunk [informal], head for the hills [informal], take to the woods [informal], fly the coop [informal], break away, leg it [Brit, informal]
    
7. Issue or leak, as from a small opening
   "Gas escaped into the bedroom"
    
8. (computing) change characters that normally have a special meaning so that they appear as literal characters rather than having their meaning applied, e.g. by prefixing the character with a special 'escape' character
   "often quotation marks are escaped by prefixing with a backslash"

See also: free

Type of: avoid, baffle, beat, bedevil, befuddle, bewilder, come forth, come out, confound, confuse, cut and run [informal], discombobulate [informal], dumbfound, egress, emerge, flee, flummox, fly, fox, fuddle, get, go away, go forth, gravel, issue, leave, mystify, nonplus, off [informal], perplex, pose, puzzle, stick, stupefy, take flight, throw, vex

Encyclopedia: Escaped