Nuts and Bolts: caron.

A caron is also called a háček or a haček. Or a hachek. Or a wedge. Or a check, inverted circumflex, inverted hat or flying bird. 

In Lithuanian, charmingly, it's sometimes called a varnelė, or little jackdaw.

It's one of those marks attached to or written close to a letter in order to show a change in its pronunciation.

A caron looks quite like a breve, which is a curved line like a smile, but a caron has a pointy base, so it's more like a small letter v hovering over a letter.

It's not always easy to see the difference, especially as sometimes the point of the caron's v is chopped off.

If you're going to call it a háček then the plural is either háčeks or háčky.

On the whole I am rather glad I write a language which doesn't use carons, but the clever writers of some Baltic, Slavic, and Berber languages (among others) scatter them hither and yon and think nothing of it.

If you come across a caron in Maths or computing then it is usually pronounced check. In other languages it can do all sorts of things to the sound of the letter over which it hovers, though it tends to turn a c sound into a ch, a s into a sh, and a z into the sound you get in the middle of the word treasure. In some Chinese writing it sensibly denotes a falling then rising tone.

I have used the word caron as often as I can in this post because it's a lot easier than having to use the things all over the place if I call it a háček

That says it all, really, doesn't it.

Thing To Be Glad You Don't Have To Use Today (Unless You Do): a caron or háček. The word caron appeared in English in the 1960s. No one knows where the word comes from, but it might be a confusion between the words caret and macron. Háčeks were invented by the Czech writer Jan Hus, though he wrote his as a dot over a letter. The v-shape (and name háček, which means small hook) only became widespread with the introduction of printing.