This could be a tricky question for many jQuery beginners, but indeed it’s a simple one. $(this) returns a jQuery object, on which you can call several jQuery methods e.g. text() to retrieve text, val() to retrieve value etc, while this represent current element, and it’s one of the JavaScript keyword to denote current DOM element in a context. You can not call jQuery method on this, until it’s wrapped using $() function i.e. $(this).