Combining caron

It changes the letter’s reading according to its language. In Czech, this mark is called a háček, meaning a little hook; the same wedge-shaped caron has different values in other spelling systems.

The Czech spelling treatise Orthographia Bohemica, from the early fifteenth century, proposed diacritics for sounds Latin spellings did not cover, so marks could replace digraphs (two letters for one sound). The system appears inconsistently in Czech manuscripts from 1413–1414. The caron began as a dot and later took its familiar wedge shape.

One proposed connection links the Czech dot and stroke marks to Old Irish manuscript practice: a dot could mark consonant softening, while a stroke could mark a long vowel. Tradition credits Jan Hus with the Czech proposal, but authorship is disputed.

How do I type a caron over a letter?

On a Czech keyboard with a dead caron key, press it, then type the letter.

A dead key waits for the next keystroke and applies the caron when that letter supports it. In the resulting text, the base letter comes first and the combining mark follows it.

For direct Unicode text entry, put U+030C after the base letter. A marked letter may be stored as one precomposed character or as a base-plus-mark pair; normalize before comparing multilingual text.

Why does a caron look like an apostrophe?

On lowercase d or t, the caron may look like an apostrophe.

An ascender can crowd the mark, so typography may give it an apostrophe-like shape. Its spelling role remains a caron.