Less-Than Sign

The less-than sign is one of the original ASCII characters, meaning it has been part of computer text since the earliest teleprinters and terminals. Because it sits in the first 128 Unicode code points, it is guaranteed to render identically on virtually every device, operating system, font, and programming language ever built.

Unicode block: Basic Latin (U+0000–U+007F). The Basic Latin block is identical to 7-bit ASCII, the character-encoding standard published in 1963 and still the foundation every modern text encoding (including UTF-8) builds on.

At Unicode code point U+003C (decimal 60), Less-Than Sign is the 18th of 84 characters cataloged in this category on How To Type Any Symbol. In terms of typing methods, like most characters outside the 0–255 legacy codepage range, it has no dedicated Alt-code or single-key shortcut on Windows or Mac, so copy-paste is the standard, universal method for typing it. Regardless of platform, clicking the copy button above places the exact character on your clipboard, ready to paste into any application that accepts Unicode text.

💡 Good to know: In programming, this character often doubles as a syntax token (delimiter, operator, or comment marker) — always check your language's reserved-character list before using it inside strings or filenames.