The slashed equals sign is one of those characters that's quietly two things at once. On screen ≠ (U+2260) looks like a single stroke through an equals sign, but under the hood Unicode defines it as exactly that: it canonically decomposes into a plain equals sign followed by a combining long solidus overlay. Two characters, one appearance — which means a poorly behaved font or a naive text search can sometimes see the pieces rather than the whole.
Its meaning is blessedly simple: "is not equal to," the negation you'd voice as "does not equal." Programming languages, though, almost never use the real glyph, spelling it != in C and its descendants, /= in Haskell and Ada, ~= in Lua, and <> in SQL and Pascal. The mathematical ≠ is a typesetting character, not something you'd type into code, so seeing it in a source file is a mild surprise.
It also has a family of relatives worth not confusing it with — identical to ≡ has its own negation ≢, and "approximately equal" its own struck-through form. The general Unicode pattern is that a combining slash negates a relation, so once you read ≠ as "equals, cancelled," the rest of the not-quite family falls into place the same way.
About Not Equal To
Not Equal To is the Unicode character ≠ at codepoint U+2260 in the Mathematical Operators block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Not Equal To
To use the Not Equal To symbol (≠) in HTML, insert the
entity ≠ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ≠ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2260';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2260' evaluates to ≠. In Python source, write '\u2260'.
The character encodes to E2 89 A0 as UTF-8 bytes and 2260 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8800.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.