The term 'caret' is a symbol (^) used in writing and editing to indicate where additional material should be inserted. It is commonly used in proofreading to indicate that something needs to be added or changed. The caret symbol is also used in computer programming to denote the exponentiation operator. In mathematics, it is used to denote the logical negation operator. The caret symbol is also used in some programming languages to denote the bitwise XOR operator.