The majority of people have at some point in their lives sat at a desk—at home, at work, or at school—and typed the ^ symbol without second thought. On almost all QWERTY keyboards, it sits silently above the 6 key, making it simple to ignore and forget. However, for well over three centuries, the caret, as it is officially called, has been quietly performing significant work in writing, mathematics, and computing. For something that most people couldn’t name on a good day, that’s a long run.
The word itself is derived from the Latin caret, which means “it is lacking” or “there is something missing.” The etymology is nearly poetic. The wedge-shaped symbol ‸ was originally used by editors and typesetters in the late seventeenth century to indicate that something should be here but isn’t yet. It was placed beneath a line of text. A correction is on the horizon. The word appeared at a time when printing presses were operating at maximum speed, physical text was being produced in large quantities, and human error was unavoidable. The caret was the solution for someone who needed a clear, widely accepted way to say, “This is incomplete.”
The fact that the symbol never truly stayed in one lane is what makes it truly fascinating, even though this is easy to overlook. It eventually made its way from the editing desk to the math classroom, where it became the go-to substitute for exponentiation in any situation where a suitable superscript was unavailable. When you enter 3^2 into a spreadsheet formula or on a calculator, you are using the same symbol that a typesetter from the seventeenth century used to indicate a missing comma. It’s possible that the majority of Excel users have never made the connection between those two concepts.
The caret took on even more tasks when computing arrived. In keyboard shortcut notation, ^C simply means to hold down the Control key and press C; it has no mathematical meaning. The same ^ in regular expressions suddenly means “starts with.” JavaScript package dependency files indicate something more akin to “compatible with, but don’t break anything.” One symbol with three distinct meanings and three distinct contexts. It’s difficult to ignore how much responsibility this little mark has been given.
The cursor question is another issue that causes confusion. The blinking vertical line that indicates where your next character will appear in web design and browser accessibility settings is also known as a caret. This is the cursor you’ve seen blink thousands of times while staring at a screen waiting for an idea to come to you. This is the source of the name “caret browsing,” a feature designed to assist individuals with visual impairments in navigating web pages with just a keyboard. Decades later, a symbol designed for paper found its way into the reasoning behind screen-based accessibility. That kind of continuity is quiet and peculiar.
The frequency with which the word becomes confused with its nearly identical neighbors is still noteworthy. When spoken aloud, the words “caret,” “carat,” “karat,” and “carrot” sound nearly identical despite having completely different meanings. The weight of a gemstone is measured in carats. The purity of gold is measured by the karat. You have the carrot in your fridge. On your keyboard is the caret. It makes sense to confuse them, but in professional writing or editing, the error usually ends badly. Even though they would both answer to the same sound, a proofreader working with carets and a jeweler dealing in carats are in completely different worlds.
The history of the caret actually illustrates how some small, practical things endure because they are truly helpful rather than because they are praised. Essays about the caret are not written by anyone. Unlike Volare, it lacks a Grammy-winning song. However, it consistently appears in manuscripts, math textbooks, software documentation, and accessibility features—all of which fundamentally indicate that something is either absent, elevated, or just getting started. There is nothing to discount after 345 years.⁖※
