Circumflex

The circumflex (ˆ) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Esperanto, Norwegian, and other languages.

In French the circumflex is used on the vowels â, ê, î, ô, and û. It is largely redundant. It marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word. For example, h�pital, for�t.
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 "f�r" (from Norse f��r, meaning "animal food", and "v�r", meaning "weather".
In English, the circumflex is sometimes used on loan words; for example, r�le.
In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'.
In Kunrei-shiki romanized Japanese, the circumflex marks long vowels. It may also be used as an alternative to the macron for marking long vowels in the Hepburn system.

Using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, one can type the letters â, ê, î, ô, and û. Dozens more letters with the circumflex are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the circumflex as a combining character.

The circumflex receives its English name from the Latin circumflexus (bent about).

Circumflex

See also