Wart

/wȯrt/

n. A small, crock-y feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of csh(1), single quotes literalize every character inside them except !. In ANSI C, the ?? syntax used obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart.

See also miswart.