Caret

The ^ symbol was originally provided in typewriters and computer printers so that circumflex accents could be overprinted on letters (as in ô or ŵ).

However, the 1965 ISO/IEC 646 standard defined code point 0x5E as one of five available for national variation,[a] with the circumflex ^ diacritic as the default and the up-arrow as one of the alternative uses.

The freestanding circumflex (which had come to be called a caret) quickly became reused for many other purposes, such as in computer languages and mathematical notation.

As the mark did not need to fit above a letter any more, it became larger in appearance such that it can no longer be used to overprint an accent in most fonts.

[7] Accented letters eventually because widely supported by adding precomposed characters[b] instead of using overprinting.

It can signify exponentiation, the bitwise XOR operator, string concatenation[citation needed], and control characters in caret notation, among other uses.

[9] In mathematics, the caret can signify exponentiation (e.g. 3^5 for 35) where the usual superscript is not readily usable (as on some graphing calculators).

The Windows command-line interpreter (cmd.exe) uses the caret to escape reserved characters[citation needed] (most other shells use the backslash).