This character is a Math Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is mirrored into Glyph for U+22D9Very Much Greater-Than. The word that U+22D8 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it. The glyph can be confused with one other glyph.
The CLDR project calls this character “very much less-than” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: inequality, less-than, mathematics, much, very.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
Mathematical Operators is a Unicode block containing characters for mathematical, logical, and set notation.
Notably absent are the plus sign (+), greater than sign (>) and less than sign (<), due to them already appearing in the Basic Latin Unicode block, and the plus-or-minus sign (±), multiplication sign (×) and obelus (÷), due to them already appearing in the Latin-1 Supplement block, although a distinct minus sign (−) is included, semantically different from the Basic Latin hyphen-minus (-).
Representations
System
Representation (click value to copy)
Nº
8920
UTF-8
E2 8B 98
UTF-16
22 D8
UTF-32
00 00 22 D8
URL-Quoted
%E2%8B%98
HTML hex reference
⋘
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake
⋘
HTML named entity
⋘
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes)
81 36 E3 35
LATEX
\verymuchless
RFC 5137
\u'22D8'
Bash and Zsh inside echo -e
\u22D8
C and C++
\u22D8
C#
\u22D8
CSS
\0022D8
Excel
=UNICHAR(8920)
Go
\u22D8
JavaScript
\u22D8
Modern JavaScript since ES6
\u{22d8}
JSON
\u22D8
Java
\u22D8
Lua
\u{22D8}
Matlab
char(8920)
Perl
"\x{22D8}"
PHP
\u{22d8}
PostgreSQL
U&'\22D8'
PowerShell
`u{22D8}
Python
\u22D8
Ruby
\u{22d8}
Rust
\u{22d8}
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