Inspired by work of Andrews and Newman [‘Partitions and the minimal excludant’, Ann. Comb. 23 (2019), 249–254] on the minimal excludant or ‘mex’ of partitions, we define four new classes of minimal excludants for overpartitions and establish relations to certain functions due to Ramanujan.

Recently, Alanazi et al. [‘Refining overpartitions by properties of nonoverlined parts’, Contrib. Discrete Math. 17(2) (2022), 96–111] considered overpartitions wherein the nonoverlined parts must be $\ell $-regular, that is, the nonoverlined parts cannot be divisible by the integer $\ell $. In the process, they proved a general parity result for the corresponding enumerating functions. They also proved some specific congruences for the case $\ell =3$. In this paper we use elementary generating function manipulations to significantly extend this set of known congruences for these functions.

Formulas evaluating differences of integer partitions according to the parity of the parts are referred to as Legendre theorems. In this paper we give some formulas of Legendre type for overpartitions.

For positive integers $n$ and $k$, let $r_{k}(n)$ denote the number of representations of $n$ as a sum of $k$ squares, where representations with different orders and different signs are counted as distinct. For a given positive integer $m$, by means of some properties of binomial coefficients, we derive some infinite families of congruences for $r_{k}(n)$ modulo $2^{m}$. Furthermore, in view of these arithmetic properties of $r_{k}(n)$, we establish many infinite families of congruences for the overpartition function and the overpartition pair function.