CSS Reference Guide: CSS :hover selector

The CSS :hover selector is a pseudo-class selector used to apply styles to an element when the mouse is moved over the element.

Here’s an example implementation:

a:hover {
    color: orangered;
}

We applied a :hover pseudo-selector to all a elements. This will make the text color of an a element to be orange-red when the mouse hovers over the element.

You can play with a live example on CodePen below:

See the Pen
css :hover by Chidume David (@philipsz-davido)
on CodePen.

We can also apply the :hover selector to all elements in the body:

body *:hover {
    background: yellow;
}

This will cause all elements inside the body element to display a yellow background when the mouse moves over the elements.

In addition to the background, we can also change the border, border-radius, font, text color, padding, margin, etc.

To apply the :hover selector to all elements in the document, we simply use the asterisk:

*:hover {
    border: 1px solid orangered;
}

This will cause the borders of hovered elements to be 1px wide, solidly red-orange in color.

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