Caret

The caret /ˈkærət/ is an inverted V-shaped grapheme. It is the spacing character ^ in ASCII (at code point 5E_hex) and other character sets that may also be called a hat, control, uparrow, or less frequently chevron, xor sign, to the power of, pointer (in Pascal), or wedge. Officially, this character is referred to as circumflex accent in both ASCII and Unicode terminology (because of its historical use in overstrike), whereas caret refers to a similar but lowered Unicode character: U+2038 ‸ CARET. Additionally, there is a lowered variant with a stroke: U+2041 ⁁ CARET INSERTION POINT.

The caret and circumflex are not to be confused with other chevron-shaped characters, such as U+028C ʌ LATIN LETTER TURNED V or U+2227 ∧ LOGICAL AND, which may occasionally be called carets too.

Origins

Proofreading mark

The caret was originally used, and continues to be, in handwritten form 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 lacks", from carēre, "to lack; to be separated from; to be free from". The caret symbol is written below the line of text for a line-level punctuation mark such as a comma, or above the line as an inverted caret (cf. U+02C7 ˇ CARON) for a higher character such as an apostrophe; the material to be inserted may be placed inside the caret, in the margin, or above the line.

Caret (disambiguation)

Caret may refer to:

See also

Caret (software)

CARET (Computerized Anatomical Reconstruction Toolkit) is a software application for the structural and functional analysis of the cerebral and cerebellar cortex. CARET is developed in the Van Essen Laboratory in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

CARET is a free, open-source application distributed in both binary and source formats under the GNU General Public License. CARET runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Image of CARET main window with functional and foci data on surface

Image of CARET main window with functional and foci data on surface

CARET's capabilities