It is natural to accompany the summary with links to the original content, and a common design pattern is to see this link in the form of a "Read More ..." button. See the `.RelPermalink`, `.Permalink`, and `.Truncated` [page variables][pagevariables].
By default, Hugo automatically takes the first 70 words of your content as its summary and stores it into the `.Summary` page variable for use in your templates. You may customize the summary length by setting `summaryLength` in your [site configuration](/getting-started/configuration/).
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You can customize how HTML tags in the summary are loaded using functions such as `plainify` and `safeHTML`.
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The Hugo-defined summaries are set to use word count calculated by splitting the text by one or more consecutive whitespace characters. If you are creating content in a `CJK` language and want to use Hugo's automatic summary splitting, set `hasCJKLanguage` to `true` in your [site configuration](/getting-started/configuration/).
Content that comes before the summary divider will be used as that content's summary and stored in the `.Summary` page variable with all HTML formatting intact.
: Extra work for content authors, since they need to remember to type `<!--more-->` (or `# more` for [org content][org]) in each content file. This can be automated by adding the summary divider below the front matter of an [archetype](/content-management/archetypes/).
You might want your summary to be something other than the text that starts the article. In this case you can provide a separate summary in the `summary` variable of the article front matter.
Because there are multiple ways in which a summary can be specified it is useful to understand the order of selection Hugo follows when deciding on the text to be returned by `.Summary`. It is as follows:
1. If there is a `<!--more-->`> summary divider present in the article the text up to the divider will be provided as per the manual summary split method
Hugo uses the _first_ of the above steps that returns text. So if, for example, your article has both `summary` variable in its front matter and a `<!--more-->` summary divider Hugo will use the manual summary split method.
Note how the `.Truncated` boolean variable value may be used to hide the "Read More..." link when the content is not truncated; i.e., when the summary contains the entire article.