U+005E "^" Circumflex Accent Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

^

U+005E "^" Circumflex Accent is a typographic mark used in writing systems to indicate a modified pronunciation, such as in French where it appears over vowels like "ê" to denote a historical change or a specific sound quality. Beyond its linguistic role, this character is widely employed in computing as the caret symbol for exponentiation in mathematics, as an escape or control character in programming languages like C and Python, and in plain text to indicate insertion or correction. It also appears in ASCII art and command-line interfaces, where it often represents the Ctrl key modifier. Despite its simple design, the circumflex accent serves diverse functions across language, mathematics, and technology, making it a versatile and enduring symbol.

General Properties

Code Point U+005E
Version Added 1.1
Name Circumflex Accent
Unicode 1.0 Name Spacing Circumflex
Block Basic Latin
General Category Modifier Symbol
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Other Neutral

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding ^
HTML Hex Encoding ^
UTF-8 Encoding 0x5E
UTF-16 Encoding 0x005E
UTF-32 Encoding 0x0000005E
C/C++/Java Escape \u005e

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value NaN
Line Break Alphabetic
East Asian Width Narrow
Case Ignorable Yes
Script Common
Script Extensions Common
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Pattern Syntax Yes
Diacritic Yes
Math Yes
Other Math Yes
Vertical Orientation Rotated
Grapheme Base Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break Other
Word Break Other
Sentence Break Other