Circumflex

The circumflex (◌̂) is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes.

It received its English name from Latin: circumflexus "bent around"—a translation of the Ancient Greek: περισπωμένη (perispōménē).

In English, the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example entrepôt, crème brûlée).

In mathematics and statistics, the circumflex diacritic is sometimes used to denote a function and is called a hat operator.

A free-standing version of the circumflex symbol, ^, is encoded in ASCII and Unicode and has become known as caret and has acquired special uses, particularly in computing and mathematics.

The circumflex has its origins in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it marked long vowels that were pronounced with high and then falling pitch.

In a similar vein, the circumflex is today used to mark tone contour in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The term "circumflex" is also used to describe similar tonal accents that result from combining two vowels in related languages such as Sanskrit and Latin.

The circumflex accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in some languages: In 18th century British English, before the cheap Penny Post and while paper was taxed, the combination ough was occasionally shortened to ô when the gh was not pronounced, to save space: thô for though, thorô for thorough, and brôt for brought.

[citation needed] In French, the circumflex generally marks the former presence of a consonant (usually s) that was deleted and is no longer pronounced.

However, â, ê and ô distinguish different sounds in most varieties of French, for instance cote [kɔt] "level, mark, code number" and côte [kot] "rib, coast, hillside".

[13] In Italian, î is occasionally used in the plural of nouns and adjectives ending with -io [jo] as a crasis mark.

For example, the plural of vario [ˈvaːrjo] "various" can be spelt vari, varî, varii; the pronunciation will usually stay [ˈvaːri] with only one [i].

The plural forms of principe [ˈprintʃipe] "prince" and of principio [prinˈtʃiːpjo] "principle, beginning" can be confusing.

Usually, â, ê and ô appear before nasals (m and n) in proparoxytone words, like higiênico but in many cases in European Portuguese e and o will be marked with an acute accent (e.g. higiénico) since the vowel quality is open (ɛ or ɔ) in this standard variety.

In music theory and musicology, a circumflex above a numeral is used to make reference to a particular scale degree.

In music notation, a chevron-shaped symbol placed above a note indicates marcato, a special form of emphasis or accent.

There is a similar but larger character, U+005E ^ CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT (^), which was originally intended to emulate the typewriter's dead key function using backspace and overtype.

Nowadays, this glyph is more often called a caret instead (though the term has a long-standing meaning as a proofreader's mark, with its own codepoints in Unicode).