Home > Circumflex

• 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 (hospital), forêt (forest). However, in the case of ô (as well as â and ê in most dialects), it changes the value of the vowel: cote and côte (the former meaning "level", "mark", the latter meaning "coast") are not homonyms.
• In Chichewa, w denotes the voiced bilabial fricative ( IPA: β), hence the name of the country Malawi.
• In Esperanto, it is used on cC , or c , is a consonant and letter in the Esperanto orthography. Since each letter in Esperanto has a consistent sound, this letter is always pronounced the same; its sound is represented by [tS] in SAMPA and [ʧ] in IPA. See also: G, H, J, S, U Es, gG , or g , is a consonant and letter in the Esperanto alphabet. Since each letter in Esperanto has a consistent sound, this letter is always pronounced the same; its sound is represented by [dZ] in SAMPA and [ʤ] in IPA. The letter is also used in Un, hH , or h , is a consonant and letter in the Esperanto alphabet. Since each letter in Esperanto has a consistent sound, this letter is always pronounced the same; its sound is represented by [x] in SAMPA and IPA. In the case of the minuscule, some fonts pl, jJ , or j , is a consonant and letter in the Esperanto alphabet. Since each letter in Esperanto has a consistent sound, this letter is always pronounced the same; its sound is represented by [Z] in SAMPA and [ʒ] in IPA. See also: Esperanto orthograph, and sS , or s , is a consonant and letter in the Esperanto alphabet. Since each letter in Esperanto has a consistent sound, this letter is always pronounced the same; its sound is represented by [S] in SAMPA and [ʃ] in IPA. See also: Esperanto orthograph. It indicates a completely different consonant from the unaccented form, and is considered a separate letter for purposes of collationIn library and information science and computer science, collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. In common usage, this is called alphabetisation though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet. Collating. See Esperanto orthographyEsperanto is written in an alphabet of twenty-eight letters. Twenty-two of these are identical in form to letters of the English alphabet (q, w, x, and y being omitted). The remaining six are accented letters, which appear as follows: c g h j s c g h j an.
• 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 is sometimes used on loanwords; 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". This could have led to spelling simplification, but did not. And it is a precursor of the ways in which trendy young people nowadays abbreviate text messages.
• In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'.
• In Slovak, circumflex (vokán) turns the letter "o" into a diphtong ô /u̯o/.
• In Vietnamese, the circumflex helps to distinguish three couples of vowels : ô [ o] and o [ Open-mid back rounded vowel], ê [ e] and e [ Open-mid front unrounded vowel], â [ Near-open central vowel] and a [ Open back unrounded vowel]. 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 (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, but sometimes it is used to distinguish homophone words, e.g. tem (he has) and têm (they have).
• 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, varii, vari ("various", plural of vario).

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).