Modifier Letter Left Arrowhead

It marks a sound detail next to a letter in phonetic transcription. Unicode files ˂ among the spacing modifier letters: small marks that sit beside a letter and take up their own width, rather than stacking on top of it like an accent. Linguists use such marks to note how a sound was produced, and ˂ belongs to a set of four arrowheads (left, right, up and down) made for that kind of notation.

The Unicode Standard notes ˂ as marking fronted articulation, a sound made further forward in the mouth than usual; a particular dictionary or field study may define its use more precisely. It is not one of the standard symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Outside linguistics you may also meet it as a stand-in for <.

Why does it appear instead of <?

Because it slips past rules that block the real less-than sign. < is one of the characters Windows forbids in file names, and in HTML it opens a tag, so some people reach for ˂, which looks the same at a glance but is on no forbidden list. A file called «˂draft˃» saves fine; «<draft>» does not.

The flip side: ˂ never works where a real < is needed. In code, a formula or a spreadsheet comparison it is not the less-than operator, so the comparison fails or gives a wrong result. If a search for < misses a sign you can plainly see, a copied ˂ is a possible culprit.