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 diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a words pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... 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. Fenêtre for instance, is derived from the Latin word fenestra. 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 Belgian pronunciation, it often lengthens the vowel; fête (party) is longer than fait (fact).

• 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" — similar to the way in which people today abbreviate words in 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.

• in standard Friulian it is used on the five vowels to mark that that vowel is long; since long vowels are a typical feature of Friulian, circumflex is used a lot.

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. In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. ... Ancient Greek refers to the stage in the history of the Greek language corresponding to Classical Antiquity, which normally applies on two ancient periods of Greek history: Archaic and Classic Greece. ... 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 (Νεοελληνική) is a dialect family that refers to the fifth stage of the evolution of the Greek language (the first four being Mycenean, Ancient Greek, Post-Classical or Hellenistic Greek and Medieval Greek), and it includes every dialect and idiom of Hellenic speech that exists in the world today. ... The acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin script. ... 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 one of the two official national languages of the Republic of Malawi, the other being English. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... Look up Malawi in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Government Government of the Republic of Malawi official site Malawi National Assembly official site Ministry of Information and Tourism official site News allAfrica. ... 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. ... In library and information science and computer science, collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. ... Sm Esperanto is written in a Latin alphabet of twenty-eight letters, upper and lower case. ... This is the approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken into 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. ... A received SMS being announced on a Nokia phone. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... 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 (lišānum akkadÄ«tum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language famaily) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. ... Aleph or alef has several meanings: Aleph or Alef (א) the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; is the equivalent letter of the Arabic alphabet. ... Friulian (friulano in Italian, Furlan in Friulian) is a Romance language belonging to the Rhaetian languages family, spoken in the north-east of Italy (Friuli-Venezia Giulia province) by about 600,000 people, the vast majority of whom speaks also Italian. ... 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 provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers. ...

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 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... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with exponential function. ... 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

See also

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