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, hôpital, forêt.
• 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", and "vêr", meaning "weather".
• In English, the circumflex is sometimes used on loan words; for example, rôle.
• In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'.
• In Hepburn romanized Japanese, the circumflex may be used as a surrogate character for the macron when marking long vowels.

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.

See also:

• Acute accent
• Grave accent
• Umlaut and Diaeresis
• Diacritic marks