<character> (Or line feed, LF, control-J, ASCII 10) /n[y]oo'li:n/ The ASCII character meaning move the cursor down to the next line. Originally this would have been done by "feeding" paper through the printer.
Newline is used under Unix as a text line terminator. A Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism. Interestingly (and unusually for Unix jargon), it is said to have originally been an IBM usage. Though the term "newline" appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before Unix. The encoding of line feed as "\n" in C and Unix strings comes from this name.
The term has been used more generally for any character, character sequence (e.g. crlf), or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure or Lisp 1.5's terpri) required to terminate a text record or separate lines.
(24 Jun 1996)