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up vote 144 down vote favorite
20

I know what these entities are used for, but I am curious for where they stand for.

Does < stand for something like "Left tag" or is it just a code?

Maybe I can use the abbreviation as a mnemonic.

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8  
w3schools.com/HTML/html_entities.asp – Stephen Feb 21 '11 at 17:12
3  
Funny. I've been using these for ten years and hadn't realized what they stood for until now. – Azmisov Jul 2 '14 at 5:09
1  
@LaurentS. "lt" = "less than" may only be easy to figure out if you took basic math instruction in English. – Matthew Leingang Jul 20 '15 at 17:57
up vote 255 down vote accepted

&lt; stands for the less-than sign ( < ) and &gt; stands for the greater-than sign ( > )

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so does &gt;= mean >= (greater or equal) – Ronaldinho Learn Coding Jul 30 '15 at 22:42
    
@RonaldinhoLearnCoding &gt;= will display >=, but if you prefer to use the literal characters, greater or equal (≥) is &ge;, and less than or equal (≤) is &le;. – gkubed 6 hours ago
up vote 64 down vote

&lt; Less than

&gt; Greater than

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2  
I thought lt stands for left tag. But gt was breaking my assumption. – abatishchev Feb 25 '13 at 20:20
    
I can replace < with &lt; Similarly, what can I use for new line character? – Anuj Balan May 9 '13 at 11:56
1  
@AnujBalan Perhaps you want the <br> tag? You don't need to escape a newline character in HTML. Most programming languages (notably JavaScript) use \n to escape newlines in strings. But if you want a paragraph character use &para; - also check out w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp – David Jun 10 '13 at 11:18
up vote 23 down vote

They're used to explicitly define less than and greater than symbols. If one wanted to type out <html> and not have it be a tag in the HTML, one would use them. An alternate way is to wrap the <code> element around code to not run into that.

They can also be used to present mathematical operators.

<!ENTITY lt      CDATA "&#60;"   -- less-than sign, U+003C ISOnum -->
<!ENTITY gt      CDATA "&#62;"   -- greater-than sign, U+003E ISOnum -->

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html

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up vote 14 down vote 
&lt; ==  lesser-than == <
&gt; == greater-than == >
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up vote 6 down vote

&lt = less than <, &gt = greater than >

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up vote 3 down vote

&gt; and &lt; is a character entity reference for the > and < character in HTML.

It is not possible to use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your file, because the browser will mix them with tags.

for these difficulties you can use entity names(&gt;) and entity numbers(&#60;).

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What is the character entity reference for 'new line character' ? – Anuj Balan May 9 '13 at 11:55
    
Check this link and this may help you in finding the new line character entity stackoverflow.com/questions/3488198/… – Kathir May 9 '13 at 13:51
    
Its &#10; Got it from a site. – Anuj Balan May 10 '13 at 7:03
up vote 0 down vote

in :

&lt=    this is    <=
=&gt    this is    =>
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