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Circumflex

Published
by
Elliot Lee
on 6/19/2006
in Life and Sidenotes
.

My cool word of the moment is circumflex. I saw it in the book lex & yacc, just skimmed through. It’s what this symbol is called: ^. It’s also known as a caret or a hat. Hat is the term I’m used to using, from physics. But “circumflex” definitely sounds cooler.

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3 Messages

Collapse Icon Elliot Lee Jun 22nd, 2006 at 3:06 pm

Thanks, andrew. I took 4 years of Spanish but never came across any circumflexes (if that’s the correct plural).

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Collapse Icon andrew247 Jun 20th, 2006 at 1:21 pm

Did you not do a foreign language at school?
A circumflex is normally on top of a letter, like this: ê, and is used to mark missing letters.
E.g. In French, tête [head] is derived from the Latin “teste”. The circumfex is used to mark the missing ’s’.
The caret is a circumflex moved off the top of a letter into it’s own space - they mean the same, but I think depending on where they are positioned in a word, they have diferent names.
But I dropped Latin a few years ago, and French this year, so I might be wrong. :(

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