kb/data/developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_Selector-0.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Selector (CSS) - Glossary | MDN	1/3	https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_Selector	reference	web, html, css, javascript, documentation	2026-05-05T05:26:33.918699+00:00	kb-cron

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1. Glossary
2. Selector (CSS)

Selector (CSS)

A CSS selector is the part of a CSS rule that describes what elements in a document the rule will match. The matching elements will have the rule's specified style applied to them.

In this article

• Example
• See also

Example

Consider this CSS: The selectors here are "p" (which applies the color green to the text inside any <p> element), "div.warning" (which makes any <div> element with the class "warning" look like a warning box), and "#customized", which sets the base font of the element with the ID "customized" to 16-pixel tall Lucida Grande or one of a few fallback fonts. We can then apply this CSS to some HTML, such as: The resulting page content is styled like this:

See also

• Learn more about CSS selectors in our introduction to CSS.
• Basic selectors
  • Type selectors elementname
  • Class selectors .classname
  • ID selectors #idname
  • Universal selectors * ns|* *|*
  • Attribute selectors [attr=value]
  • State selectors a:active, a:visited
• Grouping selectors
  • Selector list A, B
• Combinators
  • Next-sibling selectors A + B
  • Subsequent-sibling selectors A ~ B
  • Child selectors A > B
  • Descendant selectors A B
• Pseudo
  • Pseudo classes :
  • Pseudo elements ::