Caret ( /ˈkærət/) is an inverted V-shaped grapheme. Specifically, caret commonly refers to the spacing character ^ in ASCII (at code point 5Ehex) and other character sets that may also be called a hat, control, uparrow, or less frequently chevron, xor sign, to the, fang, shark (or shark-fin), 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 (HTML: ‸). Additionally, there is another lowered variant with a stroke: U+2041 ⁁ caret insertion point (HTML: ⁁).
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.