Universal selectors

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The CSS universal selector (*) matches elements of any type.

css
/* Selects all elements */
* {
  color: green;
}

The universal selector is a special type selector and can therefore be namespaced when using @namespace. This is useful when dealing with documents containing multiple namespaces such as HTML with inline SVG or MathML, or XML that mixes multiple vocabularies.

ns|* - matches all elements in namespace ns
*|* - matches all elements
|* - matches all elements without any declared namespace

Note: The universal selector (*) matches elements only. It does not directly match pseudo-elements by itself.

To match all ::before pseudo-elements on a page, for example, you would have to use a selector like *::before. This works because the * matches all elements, and the ::before pseudo-element is available on all elements.

Syntax

css

* { style properties }

The asterisk is optional with simple selectors. For instance, *.warning and .warning are equivalent.

Examples

CSS

css
* [lang^="en"] {
  color: green;
}

*.warning {
  color: red;
}

*#maincontent {
  border: 1px solid blue;
}

.floating {
  float: left;
}

/* automatically clear the next sibling after a floating element */
.floating + * {
  clear: left;
}

HTML

html
<p class="warning">
  <span lang="en-us">A green span</span> in a red paragraph.
</p>
<p id="maincontent" lang="en-gb">
  <span class="warning">A red span</span> in a green paragraph.
</p>

Result

Namespaces

In this example the selector will only match elements in the example namespace.

css
@namespace example url("http://www.example.com/");
example|* {
  color: blue;
}

Specifications

Specification

Selectors Level 4
# the-universal-selector

Browser compatibility

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This page was last modified on Nov 17, 2025 by MDN contributors.

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