wart A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localised ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of "csh(1)", single quotes literalise every character inside them except "!". In ANSI C, the "?" syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart. See also miswart.
[Jargon File]
