carriage return

This term originates from mechanical typewriters, where the carriage was the moving part holding the paper. The physical action of returning the carriage to the left margin was a distinct mechanical step from advancing the paper to a new line.

In modern computing, the carriage return (CR) is often conflated with the line feed (LF). While they were historically separate control characters—one moving the cursor to the start of the line and the other moving it down one line—most modern operating systems use a combination or a single character to represent a newline.