High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A numeric character reference (NCR) is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set (UCS) of Unicode. NCRs are typically used in order to represent characters that are not directly encodable in a particular document. When the document is interpreted by a markup-aware reader, each NCR is treated as if it were the character it represents.