The circumflex is a diacritic in the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts that is used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes.It received its English name from Latin circumflexus bent around – a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη (perispōmenē). perispōménēhe term circumflex is also used to describe similar tonal accents that result from combining two vowels in related languages such as Sanskrit and Latin. Since Modern Greek has a stress accent instead of a pitch accent, the circumflex has been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography.