A character entity is a method used to display special characters normally reserved for use in HTML. Entities make it possible to write characters that would otherwise be interpreted as part of the document's code, rather than the document's content. For example, the less than (<) and greater than (>) are used as part the HTML tag structure, so both symbols are reserved for that use. But, if you need to display those symbols on your site, you can use character entities. For example: < represents the less than (<) symbol and > represents the greater than (>) symbol.