Caron (Háček, ˇ): The Letters With It and How to Type Them

Why is it called a caron, and what do other languages call it?

Nobody knows where the word caron comes from. Unicode says so itself. Its note on known anomalies in character names (opens in a new tab) states that U+02C7 CARON and U+030C COMBINING CARON should have been called hacek. Some suspect an early standards body coined the word; others claim Linotype used it before digital type. The note ends by saying its true origin may be lost.

Wiktionary's entry for caron (opens in a new tab) agrees that the etymology is unknown. It gives the first known use as the United States Government Printing Office Style Manual of 1967, where the word seems to have meant an inverted caret. So the English name is a printers' and encoders' word. The languages that write the mark every day use names of their own.

The table gives those names with what each word means on its own, from each language's dictionary: the Czech ÚJČ handbook (opens in a new tab), the Slovene SSKJ on Fran (opens in a new tab), the Latvian Tēzaurs (opens in a new tab), and Wiktionary for mäkčeň (opens in a new tab), kvačica (opens in a new tab), paukščiukas (opens in a new tab) and hattu (opens in a new tab).

Language	Name of ˇ	What the word also means
Czech	háček	a small hook
Slovak	mäkčeň	built on mäkký, soft
Slovene	strešica	a small roof
Serbo-Croatian	kvačica	only the mark is listed
Lithuanian	paukščiukas	a chick, a small bird
Latvian	apgrieztais jumtiņš	an upside-down jumtiņš, the Latvian name for ^
Finnish	hattu	a hat
English	caron, or háček	no known origin for caron

The pictures differ, but they agree on one thing. A hook, a roof, a hat and a little bird all sit on top of the letter. The Slovak name is the odd one out: it names what the mark does, not what it looks like. In Slovak spelling the mark shows that a consonant is soft.

Did Jan Hus invent the háček?

Probably not in the way most pages say. The common story is that the church reformer Jan Hus introduced the mark in 1412, in a Latin treatise on Czech spelling. A 2023 study by Daniel Bunčić in the journal Slavia, held in the University of Cologne repository (opens in a new tab), takes that story apart.

The treatise has no title; De Orthographia Bohemica is a label modern scholars gave it. The text is anonymous. Its attribution to Hus rests on no firm evidence, and scholars date it anywhere from 1406 to the 1440s. The favourite year, 1412, assumes Hus wrote it, which makes the argument circular.

The mark it proposed was not a hook at all. It was a round dot over a consonant, telling the reader to say the letter the Czech way rather than the Latin way. That dot later turned into the háček. Here is the path from the study:

When	What happened to the mark
Late 14th century	Czech scribes already mark some consonants with a dot or a stroke, inconsistently
1406 to the 1440s	The anonymous treatise proposes a dot over Czech consonants
Early 16th century	Polish borrows the dot for ż, where it stays a dot to this day
16th century	Czech printers set Cz for Č, and ſſ for š, because the long ſ rises too high to carry a mark
1840s	Roman type lets Czech print š and Č at last
19th century	Croatian and most other Slavic languages in the Latin alphabet take the háček letters from Czech

So the Polish ż and the Czech ž share an ancestor. One kept the dot; the other let it grow into a v.

Why do ď, ť and ľ carry an apostrophe instead of a v?

Because those letters are tall. The study above notes that on letters with ascenders the háček is printed as an apostrophe. Unicode's names list (opens in a new tab) records the preferred form letter by letter, and the capitals do not all follow the small letters:

Letter	Small letter, preferred form	Capital, preferred form
d with caron	ď, apostrophe form	Ď, caron form in all contexts
t with caron	ť, apostrophe form	Ť, caron form in all contexts
l with caron	ľ, apostrophe form	Ľ, apostrophe form

Only the drawing changes. The character is still a caron. ď decomposes into d plus U+030C COMBINING CARON, the same mark as on č, and never into d plus an apostrophe. A font that draws ď as d with a v above it is showing the same letter.

The trap runs the other way. Someone without a Slovak keyboard types d' or l' instead. That is two characters, and an exact search for ď will not find it. Slovak also writes ĺ, l with acute, which the names list marks as Slovak too. In a hurry, ľ and ĺ are easy to swap; check the code point, U+013E for ľ and U+013A for ĺ.

Caron or breve: how do you tell ǎ from ă?

The caron accent comes to a point, like a small v; Unicode's names list even calls it V above. The breve is a rounded cup. Both sit above a letter, and at small sizes they are easy to confuse. The names list keeps them apart as different characters and gives each its own users:

	Caron	Breve
Spacing mark	ˇ, U+02C7	˘, U+02D8
Combining mark	U+030C	U+0306
Other names in Unicode	hacek, V above	short, Greek vrachy
On a	ǎ, the pinyin third tone	ă, Romanian, Vietnamese, Latin
On g	ǧ, Skolt Sami	ğ, Turkish, Azerbaijani
Where it comes from	a dot over Czech consonants	the Latin word for short, a mark of a short vowel

The last row comes from Bunčić's study, the rest from the names list. The two g letters show the risk best, and the names list cross-refers each to the other. A Turkish word typed with ǧ instead of ğ is a different string, and an exact search will not match it.

When you cannot tell from the picture, decompose the letter (Unicode NFD). A caron letter breaks down into its base letter and U+030C, a breve letter into its base and U+0306.

Where do ǎ, ǧ and ȟ come from if no alphabet lists them?

Letters with caron such as these come from transcription and smaller orthographies. The CLDR alphabets in AccentPad's facts hold none of these letters, so the usage map above leaves them out. Unicode's names list says who uses them:

Letters	Unicode names-list note
ǎ ǐ ǒ ǔ ǚ	Pinyin third tone
ǧ ǩ	Skolt Sami
ǰ	IPA and many languages
ȟ	Finnish Romany

The pinyin row is the one most people meet. The caron there is a tone mark: the names list says it marks the Mandarin Chinese third tone, and lists falling-rising tone as another use of the spacing caron. ǚ stacks it on ü, so it carries two marks at once. ǰ is odd in another way: it has no single capital, so its key above stands alone.