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The circumflex in Early Modern French indicated vowellength, which usually resulted from a lost s or e by way of compensatory lengthening. As most of these long vowels (except ô, in some accents â and ê) have since been shortened, it is now often said that the circumflex is used to represent those lost letters, but this is not its original purpose. Words in which a lost s did not cause lengthening do not have a circumflex (e.g. cette, chaque, notre).