bell character

English

Alternative forms

• ␇ (symbol)
• BEL (label)

Etymology

From bell +‎ character.

Noun

bell character (plural bell characters)

1. (computing) A control character with the value seven (Unicode code point U+0007, ASCII 0x07), originally used to ring a bell on telegraphy equipment to alert the operator to an incoming message; on modern computers, generally causes a beep or buzzer to sound when printed to a terminal window, or may cause the terminal window to flash briefly.