Inequality Symbols
Ninety comparison characters, each with its official Unicode name and codepoint. Two of them are plain ASCII; the other eighty-eight are not.
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Two of these are ASCII and the rest are not
< U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN and > U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN are the only
two characters in this list below U+0080. Everything else starts at U+2243 and climbs. That split
matters more than it looks: a field, filename rule or export format that accepts ASCII and nothing
else keeps the first two and drops all eighty-eight of the others.
In HTML the first two are not safe to paste
Pasted into HTML source, < starts a tag and > ends one, so
a < b typed raw can swallow the rest of the line. Write them as
< and >. The named references for the others are short:
≤ for ≤, ≥ for ≥, ≠ for ≠,
≪ for ≪, ≫ for ≫ and ≈ for
≈. Where no name exists, use a numeric reference.
Three different characters read "less than or equal to"
≤ is U+2264 LESS-THAN OR EQUAL TO, the one to reach for. ≦ is U+2266 LESS-THAN OVER EQUAL
TO, with a full bar under the wedge. ⩽ is U+2A7D LESS-THAN OR SLANTED EQUAL TO, with a tilted
bar. They say the same thing in a formula and they are three separate characters: a search for one
will not find the other two, and a string comparison sees three different values. Read the codepoint,
not the shape.
The negations are single characters
≠, ≮, ≰ and their relatives are precomposed — one codepoint each, already
carrying the stroke. You can also build a negation by following a relation with U+0338 COMBINING LONG
SOLIDUS OVERLAY, which draws the same thing from two codepoints. It looks identical and it is not the
same string, so a lookup, a sort or a deduplication pass will treat the two as unrelated. Prefer the
precomposed form when one exists.
Four of these are brackets, not relations
⦓, ⦔, ⦕ and ⦖ have LESS-THAN and GREATER-THAN in their names but Unicode files
them as Ps and Pe, opening and closing punctuation. A layout engine treats
them as a bracket pair, which in right-to-left text means it will mirror them. Four more, the APL
functional symbols at U+2343, U+2344, U+2369 and U+236F, are So rather than
Sm: they come from the APL programming language. The other eighty-two are
Sm, maths symbols.
Why your comparison table will not line up
Fourteen of these ninety are East Asian Width Ambiguous — ≤, ≥, ≠, ≪,
≫, ≈ among them — while seventy-four are Neutral and the two ASCII signs are Narrow.
In a terminal set to render Ambiguous characters double-width, ≤ takes two cells and ≲ takes
one. A monospace column mixing the two drifts by one cell per row.
Where this list stops
The last entry here is U+2A7D. Unicode’s supplemental mathematical operators continue past it with
more comparison signs, so this is a working set rather than the complete inventory. For the operators
either side of comparison, see math symbols; for the containment
relations that appear in both places, see set theory symbols.
Maths and science symbols indexes the wing.