The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. A diacritical mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ... Esperanto flag Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 The title given to this article lacks diacritics because of certain technical limitations. ... Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ...

• In Greek the circumflex occurs (subject to certain rules) on the accented syllable of a word, on long vowels only, where there was a rise and then a fall in tone in Ancient Greek. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, sometimes taking a form similar to a tilde, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent.

• In French the circumflex is used on the vowels â, ê, î ô, and û. It generally marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word – for example, hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest); remark that the former French spelling is current in English. Certain close homophones are distinguished by the circumflex, for instance cote and côte (the former meaning "level", "mark", the latter meaning "rib" or "coast"). ê is pronounced like è. In the usual pronunciations of central and northern France, ô is pronounced like eau; in the usual pronunciations Southern France, no distinction is made between ô and o.

• In Chichewa, ŵ denotes the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA: β), hence the name of the country Malaŵi.

• In Esperanto, it is used on ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ. It indicates a completely different consonant from the unaccented form, and is considered a separate letter for purposes of collation. See Esperanto orthography.

• In Norwegian, it is used, with the exception of loan words, on ô and ê, almost exclusively in the words "fôr" (from Norse fóðr), meaning "animal food", lêr, meaning "skin" (Norse leðr) and "vêr" (Norse veðr), meaning "weather".

• In English the circumflex, like other diacriticals, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language; for example, rôle. In Britain in the eighteenth century, which was before the cheap penny post and a era in which paper was taxed, the circumflex was used in postal letters to save room in an analogy with the French use. Specifically, the letters "ugh" were replaced when they were silent in the most common words, e.g., "thô" for "though", "thorô" for "thorough", and "brôt" for "brought" — a precursor of the ways in which trendy young people nowadays abbreviate text messages. This could have led to spelling simplification, but did not.

• In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'. Their names are "â din a" and "î din i".

• In Slovak, circumflex (vokáň) turns the letter "o" into a diphthong ô / u̯o/.

• In Vietnamese, the circumflex helps to distinguish three couples of vowels : ô [o] and o [ ɔ], ê [e] and e [ ɛ], â [ ɐ] and a [ ɑ]. It is not a tonal mark, so that you can for instance find association of circumflex and tonal mark, like ệ, which appears in the word Việt Nam

• In Kunrei-shiki romanized Japanese, the circumflex marks long vowels. It is also occasionally used as a surrogate for the macron for marking long vowels in the Hepburn system.

• In Welsh the circumflex (colloquially known as the to bach -- "little roof") is used on the vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y to differentiate between other words that have the same spelling. The circumflex in Welsh gives a vowel a long sound, for example môr versus mor.

• In Portuguese, it is used on â, ê and ô. It mainly marks the tonic syllable when the vowel is rounded (usually before -m and -n: pântano (bog), câmara (chamber or camera). It is sometimes used to distinguish homophone words, e.g. tem (he has) and têm (they have). The use of circumflex has been much reduced as a consequence of the orthographic reforms.

• in Italian it is used in plurals of singulars ending with ...io, thus ending them with a longer i, in modern Italian this is accomplished with a double or just a single i as in varî, varj, varii, vari ("various", plural of vario).

• in transcription of Akkadian, it is used to indicate a long vowel resulting from an aleph contraction.

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters â, ê, î, ô, û, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the circumflex are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the circumflex as a combining character. The Greek language (Greek Ελληνικά, IPA // – Hellenic) is an Indo-European language with a documented history of some 3,000 years. ... Polytonic orthography for Greek uses a variety of diacritics (πολύ = many + τόνος = accent) to represent aspects of Ancient Greek pronunciation. ... The tilde is a grapheme which has several uses, described below. ... Monotonic orthography is the simplified way for spelling modern Greek introduced in the 1980s. ... Modern Greek (Κοινή Νεοελληνική — Common Neo-Hellenic) is the present vernacular language of Greece, Cyprus and the Greek Diaspora throughout the world. ... The acute accent (´) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian, Faroese, Icelandic, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Vietnamese, Dutch, Irish Gaelic, Croatian, Navajo and other languages. ... Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ... Chichewa (Chicheŵa in Malawian English) is the official national language of the Republic of Malawi. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet used by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) the human vocal apparatus can produce. ... The Republic of Malawi is a land-locked nation in East Africa. ... Esperanto flag Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... This article needs cleanup. ... Esperanto is written in an alphabet of twenty-eight letters. ... Old Norse is the Germanic language once spoken by the inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until the 13th century. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken in by one language from another. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ... The Penny Post is any one of several postal systems in which normal letters could be sent for one penny. ... The close-mid back rounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The open-mid back rounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The close-mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The open-mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The near-open central vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The open back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 Kunrei-shiki (訓令式, Cabinet-ordered system) is a romanization system, that is, a system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Roman alphabet. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 The title given to this article lacks diacritics because of certain technical limitations. ... A macron (from Gr. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 For other meanings, see Hepburn (disambiguation). ... Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ... Transcription may be one of the following: In linguistics, transcription is the conversion of spoken words into written language. ... Akkadian was a language of the Semitic family spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. ... ALEPH (Apparatus for LEP Physics at CERN) is one of the four detectors of the LEP collider Categories: Stub | Particle detectors ... ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... This article shows Unicode characters from 128 to 999. ...

The circumflex receives its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent about) which in turn is a translation of the Greek perispomene (περισπωμένη). Latin is the language that was originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

The circumflex (or caret) character is also used without a vowel to represent exponentiation in ASCII: Caret may mean: the ASCII character ^ (0x5E hex), called circumflex accent in the Unicode standard the Unicode character ‸ (U+2038), the actual caret of the Unicode standard in Windows API terminology, it means text insertion point indicator (whereas the word cursor is reserved for mouse pointer) This is a disambiguation... In mathematics, exponentiation is a process generalized from repeated multiplication, in much the same way that multiplication is a process generalized from repeated addition. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ...

 2^3 = 8 

Circumflex is an important Dutch student union.

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (http://diacritics.typo.cz)

See also

• acute accent
• diacritic marks
• diaeresis
• grave accent
• umlaut