diff --git a/doc/source/io.rst b/doc/source/io.rst
index dd1cde0bdff73..873c528b11f09 100644
--- a/doc/source/io.rst
+++ b/doc/source/io.rst
@@ -1672,7 +1672,8 @@ function takes a number of arguments. Only the first is required.
 * ``mode`` : Python write mode, default 'w'
 * ``encoding``: a string representing the encoding to use if the contents are
   non-ASCII, for Python versions prior to 3
-* ``line_terminator``: Character sequence denoting line end (default '\\n')
+* ``line_terminator``: Character sequence denoting line end. By default
+  this is platform specific (default ``os.linesep``)
 * ``quoting``: Set quoting rules as in csv module (default csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL). Note that if you have set a `float_format` then floats are converted to strings and csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC will treat them as non-numeric
 * ``quotechar``: Character used to quote fields (default '"')
 * ``doublequote``: Control quoting of ``quotechar`` in fields (default True)
diff --git a/pandas/io/formats/csvs.py b/pandas/io/formats/csvs.py
index 46c843af043e7..5ca47f51ede95 100644
--- a/pandas/io/formats/csvs.py
+++ b/pandas/io/formats/csvs.py
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ class CSVFormatter(object):
     def __init__(self, obj, path_or_buf=None, sep=",", na_rep='',
                  float_format=None, cols=None, header=True, index=True,
                  index_label=None, mode='w', nanRep=None, encoding=None,
-                 compression='infer', quoting=None, line_terminator='\n',
+                 compression='infer', quoting=None, line_terminator=None,
                  chunksize=None, tupleize_cols=False, quotechar='"',
                  date_format=None, doublequote=True, escapechar=None,
                  decimal='.'):