# leaning toothpick syndrome

> English word · Noun

## Definitions
1. The situation in which a quoted string expression becomes difficult to read because it contains a large number of escape characters, usually backslashes, to avoid delimiter collision.

## Etymology
Introduced in the official Perl documentation, in reference to the shape of the backslash character.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/leaning-toothpick-syndrome