What ⧀ means
No: the circle marks a separate, author-defined relation. Mathematicians often circle an ordinary operator to get a related but different one, as with beside or beside . ⧀ applies the same idea to <: it compares two things in some ordering that the surrounding text defines, often a special or modified order on a particular kind of object.
It was encoded so that the entity sets used for mathematical markup (the ISO sets behind MathML and HTML names like ⧀) could all point to real Unicode characters. If you meet ⧀ in a document, look for where the author introduces it; if it appears in plain text with no definition, the writer probably just wanted a decorative “<”.
Part of the collection
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Can I use ⧀ to mean “less than”?
Better not. Readers will expect a special relation; write < for an ordinary comparison, and define ⧀ explicitly if you need a variant.
More like this
8
How to type or find ⧀
- Also called
- less-than in circle · circled less than sign · olt
- Search it as
- circled less than · less than in circle · < in a circle · olessthan · circled inequality
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⧀\29C0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.