The widely adopted form of two equal-length strokes connecting in an acute angle at the right, >, has been found in documents dated as far back as 1631.
The earliest known use of the symbols < and > is found in Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas (The Analytical Arts Applied to Solving Algebraic Equations) by Thomas Harriot, published posthumously in 1631.
[1] The text states "Signum majoritatis ut a > b significet a majorem quam b (The sign of majority a > b indicates that a is greater than b)" and "Signum minoritatis ut a < b significet a minorem quam b (The sign of minority a < b indicates that a is less than b)."
According to historian Art Johnson, while Harriot was surveying North America, he saw a Native American with a symbol that resembled the greater-than sign,[1] in both backwards and forwards forms.
BASIC and C-family languages (including Java[5] and C++) use the comparison operator > to mean "greater than".
In that regard, it is like the statement sequencing operator in imperative languages, such as the semicolon in C. In XPath the >> operator returns true if the left operand follows the right operand in document order; otherwise it returns false.
The sign is, however, provided in Unicode, as U+2265 ≥ GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO (≥, ≥, ≥).
In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell, the operator -ge means "greater than or equal to".
In Swift and Python, it is used to indicate the return value type when defining a function (i.e., func foo() -> MyClass {...}).
Unicode provides various greater than symbols:[7] (use ⇕ controls to change sort order temporarily)