It can signify exponentiation, the bitwise XOR operator, string concatenation, and control characters in caret notation, among other uses. The symbol ^ has many uses in programming languages, where it is typically called a caret. This caret is not to be confused with other chevron-shaped characters, such as the turned v or the logical AND, which may occasionally be called carets. In Unicode it is encoded as U+005E ^ CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT and in HTML may be inserted with &hat. As the mark did not need to fit above a letter anymore, it became larger in appearance such that it can no longer be used to overprint an accent.
The freestanding circumflex (which had become to be called a caret) quickly became reused for many other purposes, such as in computer languages and mathematical notation.
Instead precomposed characters were eventually created to show the accented letters. Overprinting to add an accent mark was not always supported well by printers, and was almost never possible on video terminals. Ĭaret compared to lower-case circumflex accent Although some websites call the symbol an "ASCII caret", the formal ASCII standard X calls it a circumflex. This nomenclature arose from its visual similarity to the original proofreader's caret ( ‸) and is the name for the keyboard symbol that has come to predominate outside the publishing industry. The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. In computing, the caret is the name used familiarly of the character ^, the 'freestanding' circumflex, provided on QWERTY keyboards using ⇧ Shift+ 6.
#How to type the caret symbol free
Look up caret in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. U+02C6 ˆ MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT