Â
 is the Latin capital letter A carrying a circumflex diacritic, encoded in Unicode as U+00C2 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX in the Latin-1 Supplement block. Its lowercase counterpart is â, U+00E2.1 The character is a precomposed accented letter used in languages including French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Vietnamese, where it represents the vowel A modified by the circumflex to indicate a specific pronunciation shift, such as a longer, more closed, or nasalized sound.2
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Code point and name | U+00C2, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX, Latin-1 Supplement block1 |
| Canonical decomposition | U+0041 A followed by U+0302 COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT1 |
| Lowercase | U+00E2 â LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX1 |
| Encoding origin | Unicode follows ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) in the layout of Latin letters up to U+00FF3 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC3 0x82; HTML decimal entity Â2 |
| Vietnamese derivatives | Precomposed letters Ấ, Ầ, Ẩ, Ẫ, and Ậ decompose with  or â as the base character4 |
Encoding and normalization
 occupies code point 00C2 in the Latin-1 Supplement, a block whose Latin letter layout Unicode takes from ISO/IEC 8859-1.1 • 3 Like other precomposed accented Latin letters, it has a canonical decomposition: the plain letter A (U+0041) followed by the combining circumflex accent (U+0302).1 Under Unicode normalization, Normalization Form C (NFC) keeps the precomposed character, while Normalization Form D (NFD) replaces it with the decomposed sequence; the two forms are canonically equivalent and must compare as equal.5
The character also serves as a base for further stacking. Vietnamese orthography combines the circumflex with tone marks, and Unicode encodes these as separate precomposed characters in the Latin Extended Additional block: Ấ (circumflex and acute), Ầ (circumflex and grave), Ẩ (circumflex and hook above), Ẫ (circumflex and tilde), and Ậ (circumflex and dot below), each decomposing with  or â as its base.4 For example, NFC represents the combination of vowel letter and tone mark as the single unit U+1EA8 Ẩ, while NFD decomposes it into the sequence U+0041, U+0302, U+0309.3
Use in languages
French. In French, â often marks a historical loss of a following "s", as in âme from Latin anima, and can distinguish homophones.2 In one analysis of French orthography, the circumflex appears on vowels which formerly preceded an [s], as in bête.6
Romanian. In Romanian, â is a distinct letter of the alphabet representing the high central vowel /ɨ/, conventionally described as a close central unrounded vowel.2 • 10
Vietnamese. Vietnamese uses â as one of its vowel letters, and the tone-marked derivatives built on it appear throughout the language's phonemic orthography, in which each grapheme corresponds to at most one phoneme.4 • 7
History of the diacritic
The circumflex mark itself descends from Ancient Greek prosody. Greek had three accents: the acute, marking a raised tone; the grave, a low-pitched tone; and the circumflex, which combines acute and grave and could stand only on vowels long by nature or diphthongs.8 The English word comes from Latin circumflexus, "bent around", a translation of Greek perispōmenos, "drawn around", in reference to the mark's shape.9 From its original Greek use over long vowels with a particular tone, the mark was transferred to other languages as a sign of length, contraction, or a particular variety of long vowel.9
Character data
The character was added in Unicode version 1.1; its Unicode 1.0 name was LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A CIRCUMFLEX before the current name was adopted.2 Its general category is Uppercase Letter, its bidirectional class is Left To Right, and its simple lowercase mapping is U+00E2.2 In UTF-8 it encodes as the two bytes 0xC3 0x82, and in UTF-16 as 0x00C2.2
References
- C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement, Unicode 18.0.0 names list
- U+00C2 "Â" Latin Capital Letter A with Circumflex, unicodecharacter.org
- The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0, Chapter 7
- Latin Extended Additional, Unicode 18.0.0 names list
- UAX #15: Unicode Normalization Forms
- Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
- ViSpeechFormer: A Phonemic Approach for Vietnamese Automatic Speech Recognition, arXiv
- Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges: Accent, General Principles
- Circumflex, World English Historical Dictionary
- Vowels of Romanian: Historical, Phonological and Phonetic Studies
Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script
Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
Your notes
© 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Developers: read Edgepedia by API or MCP. Embed a reference card.