Literal

Literals represent values in JavaScript. These are fixed values—not variables—that you literally provide in your script.

• Array literals
• Boolean literals
• Floating-point literals
• Numeric literals
• Object literals
• RegExp literals
• String literals

A string literal is zero or more characters enclosed in double (") or single quotation marks ('). A string must be delimited by quotation marks of the same type (that is, either both single quotation marks, or both double quotation marks).

The following are examples of string literals:

'foo'
"bar"
'1234'
'one line \n new line'
"John's cat"

An object literal is a list of zero or more pairs of property names and associated values of an object, enclosed in curly braces ({}).

The following is an example of an object literal. The first element of the car object defines a property, myCar, and assigns to it a new string, "Toyota"; the second element, the getCar property, is immediately assigned the result of invoking the function carTypes('Honda'); the third element, the special property, uses an existing variable (sales).

var sales = 'BMW';

function carTypes(name) {
  if (name == 'Honda') {
    return name;
  } else {
    return "Sorry, we don't sell " + name + ".";
  }
}

var car = { myCar: 'Toyota', getCar: carTypes('Honda'), special: sales };

console.log(car.myCar);   // Toyota
console.log(car.getCar);  // Honda
console.log(car.special); // BMW

• Literal on Wikipedia