Equals sign - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The equals sign (=), otherwise referred to as the equality sign or equal to sign or equal sign for short, is a symbol used to indicate equality. It looks like two parallel horizontal lines. Computers display the equals sign with the Unicode or ASCII character 003D (in hexadecimal).

Similar symbols

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The symbol used to say when items are not equal is "≠" (slashed equal sign).[1]

There are several symbols that can be used to say items are "approximately the same," "similar to" or "about equal." Some of these symbols include:

  • "≈" (two tildes or wavy lines, often used for "approximately equal")[1]
  • "⩰" (two tildes above two lines)
  • "≅" (one tilde above two lines, often used in modular arithmetic to state a congruence relation)
  • "≃" (one tilde above one line)
  • "~" (one wavy line, often used for mathematical relations)[1]
  • "≐" (two lines with a dot above them, often used for "is defined as")
  • "≡" (three lines, often used for equivalence)[2]

Each of these symbols has more than one possible meaning, and are all used to state that two things are about equal (or equivalent in some way).

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References

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  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Compendium of Mathematical Symbols". Math Vault. 2020-03-01. Retrieved 2020-08-31.
  2. "Math Symbols List (+,-,x,/,=,...)". www.rapidtables.com. Retrieved 2020-08-31.