Writing Special Characters Correctly: &, <, ©, and Accented Letters
Writing Special Characters Correctly: &, <, ©, and Accented Letters
~7 Min. Lesezeit Zuletzt aktualisiert am August 8, 2026
You've already used © twice without us explaining exactly what's going on there. Time to catch up: those are called entities.
The problem with angle brackets
You know: < and > have a special meaning to the browser - they mark the beginning and end of a tag. But what if you actually want to display the character < as visible text on your page, for example to write about HTML code? If you just write it as-is, the browser confuses it with the start of a real tag!
The solution: entities
An entity is a special character sequence that starts with & and ends with ;. The browser automatically converts it into the intended character. The three most important ones:
< stands for <
> stands for >
& stands for &Achtung: Notice the last one: even the ampersand character & itself must be written as an entity, since & is the start of every entity! That's why & is used for a visible & character.
More useful entities
© stands for © (copyright sign)
stands for a space that does NOT get wrapped
€ stands for €
… stands for … (an ellipsis) ("non-breaking space") is especially useful when two words must absolutely stay on the same line, for example in "3 pm" - this prevents the number and the unit from being torn apart at a random line break.
Accented letters: a special case
Good news: because you learned <meta charset="UTF-8"> in chapter 4, you can type special characters and accented letters directly into your text as normal - you don't need entities for those. Before UTF-8, web developers had to use entities for accented letters too, but that's practically never necessary anymore today.
Tipp: Above all, memorize the three most important entities: <, >, &. You can just look up any others as needed on the internet ("HTML entity for [character]").
An example: showing HTML code on your own page
If you want to explain what an HTML tag looks like on your page, for example, you need entities:
<p>A heading is written in HTML like this: <h1>Text</h1></p>That actually displays the text <h1>Text</h1> in the browser, instead of creating a real heading.