What they mean, why they can break HTML, and how they differ from angle quotes — click to copy.
Click either to copy · U+003C / U+003E
| Property | Less Than | Greater Than |
|---|---|---|
| Character | < | > |
| Unicode code point | U+003C | U+003E |
| Unicode name | LESS-THAN SIGN | GREATER-THAN SIGN |
| Unicode block | Basic Latin (standard ASCII) | |
| Category | Math / comparison symbol | |
< and > are inequality operators: a < b means a is smaller than b, and a > b means a is larger than b. They've been part of standard mathematical notation since the 1600s and were carried directly into the original ASCII character set, which is why they sit in the Basic Latin block rather than the dedicated Mathematical Operators block used by symbols like ≠ or ∞ that arrived with Unicode.
That ASCII-era placement is also why < and > do a second job almost every keyboard user runs into: in HTML and XML, < is the character that opens every tag. A stray < typed as plain text can make a browser start parsing a tag that was never meant to exist, which is why HTML requires escaping them as < and > anywhere they appear as literal text rather than markup.
| Platform | Works? |
|---|---|
| Instagram bio / caption | Yes |
| Discord | Yes |
| TikTok display name | Yes |
| Yes | |
| Roblox / PlayStation / Xbox username | No — these platforms block < > in display names since they can be mistaken for markup or code |
| Method | Less Than | Greater Than |
|---|---|---|
| Keyboard (US layout) | Shift+, | Shift+. |
| HTML entity | < | > |
| CSS content | content: "\003C" | content: "\003E" |
| LaTeX (math mode) | < | > |
< and > are two of dozens of operators, Greek letters, and set-theory symbols in the full math symbols library.
Browse Math Symbols →HTML uses < to start every tag, so a browser reading a raw < in your text tries to parse a tag and the rest of your content can vanish or render wrong. Escape it as < (and > as >) whenever you're writing < or > inside HTML, not just inside a tag.
They're standard keys on every keyboard — Shift+comma for < and Shift+period for > on a US layout. No Alt code or special input is needed.
< (U+003C) is the plain ASCII comparison operator used in math and code. ‹ › (U+2039/U+203A) are single guillemets and « » (U+00AB/U+00BB) are double guillemets — both are quotation marks used in French, German, and other European typography, not comparison symbols, even though they look similar.
< and > are strict comparisons (excludes equal values); ≤ and ≥ include the possibility of equality. 3 < 3 is false, but 3 ≤ 3 is true. Both ≤ and ≥ are their own precomposed Unicode characters, covered on the math symbols library.