HTML Symbols

HTML Entities and Symbols

Using Special Characters in HTML

Sometimes you need to display characters that are not readily available on a standard keyboard (like ©, €, ♥) or characters that have special meaning in HTML itself (like <, >, &).

HTML provides mechanisms called entities to represent these characters.

There are two main ways to use entities:

• Entity Names: Human-readable codes like © for © or < for <. These are easier to remember but only exist for commonly used characters.
• Entity Numbers (Character References): Use the character’s Unicode number, either in decimal (© for ©) or hexadecimal (© for ©). These can represent any Unicode character.

Using entities ensures that symbols display correctly regardless of the page’s character encoding, although using UTF-8 encoding for your HTML document is the modern standard and allows many symbols to be used directly in the source code.

Best Practice	Always declare your character encoding as UTF-8 in the <head> section: <meta charset="UTF-8">. This allows direct use of many symbols. Use entities primarily for characters that conflict with HTML syntax (<, >, &, ") or are difficult to type.

Example:

<p>The less-than sign: &lt;</p>
<p>The greater-than sign: &gt;</p>
<p>The ampersand sign: &amp;</p>
<p>The copyright symbol: &copy; or &#169;</p>
<p>The Euro symbol: &euro; or &#8364;</p>
<p>A heart symbol: &hearts; or &#9829; (or directly ♡ if using UTF-8)</p>

Commonly Used Entities

Reserved Characters:

Character	Entity Name	Entity Number	Description
<	<	<	Less than
>	>	>	Greater than
&	&	&	Ampersand
"	"	"	Double quotation mark
'	'	'	Single quotation mark (apostrophe)

Other Symbols:

Character	Entity Name	Entity Number	Description
©	©	©	Copyright sign
®	®	®	Registered trademark sign
™	™	™	Trademark sign
€	€	€	Euro sign
£	£	£	Pound sign
¥	¥	¥	Yen sign
			Non-breaking space

The non-breaking space ( ) is particularly useful when you want to prevent a line break between two words or elements.

Mathematical Symbols

HTML entities can represent many mathematical symbols:

Char	Entity Name	Number	Description
∀	∀	∀	For All
∂	∂	∂	Partial Differential
∃	∃	∃	There Exists
∅	∅	∅	Empty Set
∇	∇	∇	Nabla (vector differential)
∈	∈	∈	Element Of
∉	∉	∉	Not an Element Of
∋	∋	∋	Contains as Member
∏	∏	∏	N-ary Product
∑	∑	∑	N-ary Summation
×	×	×	Multiplication Sign
÷	÷	÷	Division Sign

Greek Letters

Capital and lowercase Greek letters are available:

Char	Entity Name	Number	Description
Α	Α	Α	Greek Capital Alpha
Β	Β	Β	Greek Capital Beta
Γ	Γ	Γ	Greek Capital Gamma
Δ	Δ	Δ	Greek Capital Delta
α	α	α	Greek Small Alpha
β	β	β	Greek Small Beta
γ	γ	γ	Greek Small Gamma
δ	δ	δ	Greek Small Delta

Finding More Symbols

There are thousands of characters defined in Unicode. You can find entity names or numbers using online resources:

• Search engines (e.g., search for “HTML entity for checkmark”)
• Comprehensive entity reference websites (like amp-what.com)
• The official Unicode character charts (more technical)

Remember, using UTF-8 encoding allows you to often paste the symbol directly into your HTML code.