Exit

[eg-zit, ek-sit] /ˈɛg zɪt, ˈɛk sɪt/

noun
1.
a way or passage out:
Please leave the theater by the nearest exit.
2.
any of the marked ramps or spurs providing egress from a highway:
Take the second exit after the bridge for the downtown shopping district.
3.
a going out or away; departure:
to make one’s exit.
4.
a departure of an actor from the stage as part of the action of a play.
5.
Also called exit card. Bridge. a card that enables a player to relinquish the lead when having it is a disadvantage.
verb (used without object)
6.
to go out; leave.
7.
Bridge. to play an exit card.
verb (used with object)
8.
to leave; depart from:
Sign out before you exit the building.
[eg-zit, ek-sit] /ˈɛg zɪt, ˈɛk sɪt/
verb (used without object)
1.
(he or she) goes offstage (used as a stage direction, often preceding the name of the character):
Exit Falstaff.
/ˈɛɡzɪt; ˈɛksɪt/
noun
1.
a way out; door or gate by which people may leave
2.
the act or an instance of going out; departure
3.

4.
departure from life; death
5.
(theatre) the act of going offstage
6.
(in Britain) a point at which vehicles may leave or join a motorway
7.
(bridge)

verb (intransitive)
8.
to go away or out; depart; leave
9.
(theatre) to go offstage: used as a stage direction: exit Hamlet
10.
(bridge) to lose the lead deliberately
11.
(sometimes transitive) (computing) to leave (a computer program or system)
/ˈɛɡzɪt; ˈɛksɪt/
noun
1.
(in Britain) a society that seeks to promote the legitimization of voluntary euthanasia
n.

1530s, from Latin exit “he or she goes out,” third person singular present indicative of exire “go out,” from ex- “out” (see ex-) + ire “to go” (see ion).

Also from Latin exitus “a leaving, a going out,” noun of action from exire. Originally in English a Latin stage direction (late 15c.); sense of “door for leaving” is 1786. Meaning “departure” (originally from the stage) is from 1580s. The verb is c.1600, from the noun; it ought to be left to stage directions and the clunky jargon of police reports.

Those who neither know Latin nor read plays are apt to forget or not know that this is a singular verb with plural exeunt. [Fowler]

Related: Exited; exiting.

1. A library function in the C and Unix run-time library that causes the program to terminate and return control to the shell. The alternative to calling “exit” is simply to “fall off the end” of the program or its top-level, main, routine.
Equivalent functions, possibly with different names, exist in pretty much every programming language, e.g. “exit” in Microsoft DOS or “END” in BASIC.
On exit, the run-time system closes open files and releases other resources. An exit status code (a small integer, with zero meaning OK and other values typically indicating some kind of error) can be passed as the only argument to “exit”; this will be made available to the shell. Some languages allow the programmer to set up exit handler code which will be called before the standard system clean-up actions.
2. Any point in a piece of code where control is returned to the caller, possibly activating one or more user-provided exit handlers. This might be a return statement, exit call (in sense 1 above) or code that raises an error condition (either intentionally or unintentionally). If the exit is from the top-level routine then such a point would typically terminate the whole program, as in sense 1.
(2008-05-15)