From XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language ( 2007-01-23) A character reference is an XML-style reference to a character, identified by its decimal or hexadecimal code point.

From Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 ( 2000-10-06) A character reference refers to a specific character in the ISO/IEC 10646 character set, for example one not directly accessible from available input devices.

A way, within an SGML language such as HTML, of referencing a character using a simple string of numbers reflecting the position of the character in the current character set. For example, the character reference é is the reference for e with an acute accent (é) within the ISO Latin-1 character set. Note, however, that character reference will produce a different character if a different character set is involved. For a character-set independent representation, see entity reference. Chinese/Japanese/Korean, often used in the discussion of character sets and of the issues important to these language/character set groups.