Letter 'p' with a circumflex accent?

Enter the letter p. Then press control+cmd+spacebar to open the character viewer. In its search field, enter the word circumflex and you will see the combining circumflex accent on the fourth row of symbols. Just double-click it to have it combine over the existing letter p. The following is in Times New Roman Regular done in Pages v12.1 on macOS 11.6.8 with U.S. English as the preferred language:

The combining circumflex accent will automatically be added to the character viewer Favorites. The old standby, of pressing and holding the keyboard for an array of accents, nor pressing option + s and then the letter p on a U.S. or ABC-Extended keyboard does not work correctly — it places the circumflex before the letter p.

John Galt wrote: No matter what I did the p̂ character does not appear in my character viewer.

You can't get that character in Character Viewer. You can only get the combining circumflex character on its own. First you tape p in some text field and then you double click on combining circumflex U+0302.

The bad appearance of your p̂ is probably caused by the font here.

For whatever reason I could not make VikingOSX's solution work. No matter what I did the p̂ character does not appear in my character viewer. I tried a variety of different language input sources and keyboards and gave up.

If it works for you, great! If not though, may I suggest using text substitutions. Copy that character p̂ and paste it into the Replace list, With list in Keyboard Preferences. Use a key sequence that works for you, for example a carat followed by the p character.

Then, typing ^p followed by a space character becomes p̂.

Having said that what I just typed above does not look right, and only approximates the much nicer image in his screenshot. My circumflex is not centered over the p. It may be the browser I'm using, so see what it looks like for you.

If you activate the ABC Extended Input Source, you can add ^ to any character by typing option shift 6 after it.

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That worked. I was trying option shift 6 before the character.

Ok. That too worked.

The bad appearance of your p̂ is probably caused by the font here.

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It looks perfect on an iPhone.