What ﹤ means
It means “less than”; the difference is its layout.
The first printed < appears in an algebra book published in 1631, ten years after Thomas Harriot’s death. Its editors are credited with the signs; Harriot’s surviving manuscripts use other marks.
CNS 11643 is a Chinese text-exchange standard with small ASCII punctuation forms. ASCII is the basic Latin computer character set; Unicode retains ﹤ for compatibility with older encodings.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1What does NFKC do to ﹤?
NFKC maps ﹤ to <. The comparison stays the same, but the exact character changes.
How to type ﹤
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType FE64, then Alt+X to get ﹤.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “small less-than sign”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType fe64, then Enter or Space.
HTML
﹤CSS
\FE64Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
﹤
HTML hex
﹤
CSS content
content: "\FE64";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EF%B9%A4
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.