The circumflex ( ˆ ) (often called a "caret", or a "hat") is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans, Naliuhn, and other languages, and formerly in Turkish
It is also used in "geek" to mean the start of a expresion.
ie in regex s/^fnord/Fnord/ would capitlise the word Fnord if its at the start of a line.