U+00E2 "â" Latin Small Letter A with Circumflex Unicode Character
U+00E2 "â" Latin Small Letter A with Circumflex is a precomposed letter used in several languages, most notably French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Vietnamese, where it represents a distinct vowel sound often pronounced with a more closed or centralized quality compared to the plain letter "a". Its graphic form combines a standard lowercase "a" with a circumflex accent (ˆ) positioned above it. Historically, the circumflex in French often marks the loss of a following "s" from earlier stages of the language, as seen in words like "hôpital" (from Latin "hospitale"), while in Romanian it indicates a mid-central vowel sound. In Unicode, it is located in the Latin-1 Supplement block and has a numeric code point of 226 in decimal, allowing for consistent representation across digital text and systems.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00E2 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Latin Small Letter A with Circumflex |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Latin Small Letter A Circumflex |
| Block | Latin-1 Supplement |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "a" U+0061 Latin Small Letter A "̂" U+0302 Combining Circumflex Accent |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | â |
| HTML Hex Encoding | â |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC3 0xA2 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00E2 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000E2 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00e2 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Lowercase | Yes |
| Simple Uppercase Code Point | "Â" U+00C2 Latin Capital Letter A with Circumflex |
| Simple Titlecase Code Point | "Â" U+00C2 Latin Capital Letter A with Circumflex |
| Uppercase Code Point | "Â" U+00C2 Latin Capital Letter A with Circumflex |
| Titlecase Code Point | "Â" U+00C2 Latin Capital Letter A with Circumflex |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Titlecased | Yes |
| Changes When Uppercased | Yes |
| Script | Latin |
| Script Extensions | Latin |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Alphabetic letter |
| Sentence Break | Lower |