Some naming conventions promote the use of the underscore character (" _ ") for those variables that must be declared but are not being used. One common case is that in which a function signature contains some variables that will not be used, as for instance the Express error handlers: app.use(function(err, req, res, next) { console.error(err.stack); res.status(500).send('Something broke!'); }); In the above example only the arguments err and res are being used, though all four must be defined in the handler signature. Thus, following the naming convention of using underscores for those unused variables, we could recode it as: app.use(function(err, _, res, __) { console.error(err.stack); res.status(500).send('Something broke!'); }); Though it makes the function more readable, it comes with a problem if using ESlint: it will blame by declaring unused variables. error '_' is defined but never used error '__' is define