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The caret sign is an inverted V-shaped grapheme. It is the space character ^ in ASCII (at code point 5Ehex) and other character sets which can also be called a hat, control, up or, less frequently, chevron, xor sign, ‘to the power of’ (exponent), pointer (in Pascal), or corner. Officially, this character is called circumflex accent in the terminology ASCII and Unicode (due to its historical use in overprinting). At the same time, Caret refers to a similar but lowered Unicode character: U+2038 ‸ CARET. Also, there is a reduced variant with a stroke: U+2041 ⁁ CARET INSERTION POINT.

The Caret sign was initially and continues to be used in handwriting as a proofreading mark to indicate where a punctuation mark, word or phrase should be inserted in a document. The term comes from the Latin caret, “it is lacking”, from carēre, “to lack, separated from, to be free from”. The Caret sign symbol is written under the line of text for a punctuation mark at line level, such as a comma, or above the line as a reverse Caret sign for a higher character. An example is an apostrophe; the material to be Caret can be placed inside the cursor, in the margin or above the line.

An embossed variant of the symbol can be found on some typewriters, where it is used to denote a circumflex accent in individual languages, such as French, Welsh and Portuguese. It is usually a dead key, which does not advance the carriage and allows the next letter to striking the same point (below the paper’s circumflex).

Concerning computer systems, the original 1963 version of the ASCII standard reserved the code point 5Ehex for an upward arrow (↑). However, the 1965 ECMA-6 standard replaced the up arrow with a circumflex (^), which was also applicable as a diacritic, and two years later, the second revision of ASCII followed suit. Since the early mainframe and minicomputer widely used teletypewriters as output devices, printing the circumflex above a letter if necessary. However, with the proliferation of monitors, this has been deemed insufficient, and precomposed characters, with the diacritic included, have been introduced instead into the accompanying character sets, such as Latin-1 and then Unicode. The original circumflex was left for other purposes, and since it no longer needed to stand over a letter, it became more extensive in appearance.

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