The widely adopted form of two equal-length strokes connecting in an acute angle at the left, <, has been found in documents dated as far back as the 1560s.
The less-than sign, <, is an original ASCII character (hex 3C, decimal 60).
ASCII does not have a less-than-or-equal-to sign, but Unicode defines it at code point U+2264.
In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell, the operator -le means "less than or equal to".
In the R programming language, the less-than sign is used in conjunction with a hyphen-minus to create an arrow (<-), this can be used as the left assignment operator.
In HTML (and SGML and XML), the less-than sign is used at the beginning of tags.
Unicode provides various Less Than Symbols:[2] The less-than sign may be seen for an approximation of the opening angle bracket, ⟨.
True angle bracket characters, as required in linguistics notation, are expected in formal texts.
Put another way, the "jaws" (the wider section of the symbol) always direct to the larger number.