anglebracket

Angle bracket, commonly called angle brackets or chevrons, refers to the pair of punctuation marks used in many writing and coding systems: the left angle bracket < and the right angle bracket >. The individual marks are the less-than sign and the greater-than sign. In typography, the term angle brackets can refer to the pair as a unit, while chevron is also used to describe the V-shaped marks in some fonts and contexts.

In markup languages such as HTML and XML, angle brackets delimit tags and elements, for example <p> or <div class="x">. In text, they are often escaped as &lt; and &gt; to prevent parsing as markup. Many programming languages use angle brackets for other purposes, including as operators for comparison (less-than, greater-than) or, in languages like C++, to specify template and generic parameters (for example, vector<int>).

In mathematics and related fields, angle-bracket notation uses the symbols ⟨ and ⟩ to enclose quantities. Common uses include inner products ⟨x, y⟩, averages or sequences ⟨a_i⟩, and other specialized notations depending on the discipline. In linguistics, angle brackets may enclose graphemic forms or annotations of words, distinct from phonetic transcriptions typically written with slashes or brackets.

Typography and punctuation also include related marks known as guillemets (« and »), which are sometimes referred to as double angle brackets. The single angle brackets have various regional uses and typographic styles, and their appearance can vary across fonts.