Cirkumflekta

Cirkumflekta, known in English as the circumflex, is a diacritic mark placed above a letter. It appears as a small wedge or hat-shaped symbol and derives its name from the Latin circumflexus, meaning bent around or curved over. The mark is used in several writing systems to modify the pronunciation or to indicate historical changes in the spelling of a word.

In French, for example, letters with a circumflex such as â, ê, î, ô and û are common. They often signal a former loss of an s after the vowel and can reflect vowel quality or length differences in certain words. Romanian uses the letters â and î with a circumflex to denote distinct phonemes. In Vietnamese orthography, vowels may carry a circumflex as part of the overall vowel composition, contributing to a set of distinct vowel sounds when combined with other diacritics.

Typography and encoding considerations include the base character for the circumflex, the combining circumflex accent U+0302, and precomposed letters such as â (U+00E2), ê (U+00EA), î (U+00EE), ô (U+00F4) and û (U+00FB). In everyday writing, the symbol ^ is often called a caret in computing contexts, while the diacritic above letters is referred to as the circumflex. The use of cirkumflekta varies by language and orthographic tradition, serving to convey pronunciation, etymology, or phonemic distinctions.