hard return

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hard return In word processing, the action prompted by the “Enter” or carriage return key and used, for example, to mark the end of a paragraph; it causes a new line to be started at that point in the text. Other new lines will be inserted where necessary throughout the paragraph by the word-processing program to avoid text exceeding the right-hand margin; these are soft returns, and will normally be moved around automatically as the text is modified.

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