How to type Less Than or Equal
To type Less Than or Equal (≤), press Alt + 8804 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + , on Mac, or write ≤ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2264 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2264 on Linux, or 2264 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Less-Than Or Equal To
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2264
- Windows
- Alt + 8804 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 8804 | Above 255, so Windows will not accept it as typed. Copy the character instead. |
| Mac | Option + , | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ≤ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2264 | LESS-THAN OR EQUAL TO |
Symbols related to Less Than or Equal
The Unicode code chart points from ≤ to <, and the rest are filed under or, equals and inequality in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other math symbols
≤ lives in the Mathematical Operators block (U+2200-U+22FF), the core set of mathematical and logical operators. Within Unicode it is classified as Sm, a mathematical symbol. Software may lay it out with the spacing an operator expects.
What Less Than or Equal is used for
In mathematical notation ≤ is a relation: it makes a claim about the two things either side of it, which is true or false rather than a value to work out. TeX gives a relation more space than an operator, and breaks a long line at one in preference to breaking at an operator. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\leq$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for ≤ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are equals and inequality. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Less Than or Equal is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Less Than or Equal
The code chart points from ≤ to Less-Than Sign. These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Less Than or Equal looks nearly right but not quite.
How Less Than or Equal behaves in software
≤ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one. It is a mirrored character: in right-to-left text it is drawn reversed, so it keeps pointing at what it pointed at.
What people ask about Less Than or Equal
What is the sign for less than or equal to?
≤ is LESS-THAN OR EQUAL TO, encoded at U+2264. It is distinct from less-than sign (U+003C), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
How to write less than or equal to on keyboard?
You can press Alt + 8804 on Windows, with Num Lock on and the digits typed on the numeric keypad, or press Option + , on Mac. Either produces ≤.
Every way to write Less Than or Equal
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2264 |
| Decimal | 8804 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 89 A4 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 22 64 |
| HTML entity | ≤ |
| HTML numeric | ≤ or ≤ |
| CSS | \2264 |
| JavaScript | \u2264 |
| Python | \u2264 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%89%A4 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\leq$ |
| SVG | 2264.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ≤ arrives as ≤
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 89 A4 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly ≤. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+2264, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.