Common HTML Entities

An HTML entity is a short code that produces a character you cannot — or should not — type directly into HTML. The three you will use most are & for an ampersand, < for a less-than sign and > for a greater-than sign: without them, the browser reads your text as markup. The rest of this table covers the entities people actually reach for — quotes, dashes, currency, maths and arrows — with the character each one produces.

Every entity starts with & and ends with a semicolon. For anything not listed here, use the character’s numeric code instead — for example, 😀 for 😀 — or copy the character itself into a UTF-8 document, which works in any modern browser.