circumflexaccented

Circumflexaccented is an English adjective used to describe letters that bear the circumflex diacritic, a wedge-shaped mark placed above a vowel. The diacritic is typically written as the circumflex mark, often depicted as a small ^ above the letter.

Common precomposed forms include â, ê, î, ô, û and their uppercase equivalents Â, Ê, Î, Ô, Û. In Vietnamese orthography, the letters â, ê, and ô are standard vowels formed with the circumflex; other vowels may also receive a combining circumflex mark to create culturally recognized characters.

Functions of the circumflex vary by language. In French, the circumflex can signal a historical loss of an s and may reflect subtle differences in vowel quality; in Romanian, it marks specific phonemes; in Vietnamese, it is an integral part of certain vowels and contributes to distinguishing sounds rather than indicating historical changes.

Encoding and typography: Unicode provides precomposed code points for many circumflexed vowels (for example, U+00E2 for â, U+00EA for ê, U+00F4 for ô) and also supports a combining circumflex (U+0302). In plain text lacking diacritics, the circumflex may be approximated with the caret character ^, but this does not produce a true circumflexed letter. In computing, circumflexaccented characters are treated as distinct letters for rendering, normalization, and sorting.