Dash & Hyphen Symbols

The three everyday dashes differ in length and in job. The hyphen - joins words and parts of words (well-known, twenty-one, co-op) and is the only one on the keyboard. The en dash – is as wide as a letter n and marks a span or a connection between two things: 9–5, pages 12–30, the London–Paris train, a 3–1 win. The em dash — is as wide as the type size itself and marks a break in a sentence: an aside, an interruption, a sharp turn of thought, or a source line after a quotation.

House styles disagree about the spaces. American practice in the Chicago style closes the em dash up to the words on both sides—like this—while AP style and most newspapers put a space on each side. British publishers often prefer a spaced en dash – like this – for the same job. Whichever you choose, keep it consistent, and never type two hyphens -- where a real dash belongs unless you are writing plain ASCII.

The minus sign − is a fourth character, not a dash. It is a maths operator, the same width and height as the plus sign in a well-made font, so 5 − 3 lines up with 5 + 3. The hyphen-minus - on the keyboard is shorter and sits lower; spreadsheets and calculators accept it, but typeset maths and formulas look right only with −. The heavy ➖ is the emoji version for pros-and-cons lists and chat, and ⁻ ₋ are the superscript and subscript minus for exponents and indices like 10⁻³.

How to type an em dash on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android

On Windows hold Alt and type 0151 on the number pad for an em dash, or 0150 for an en dash; a laptop without a number pad can use the Windows emoji panel (Win + .), the Symbols tab, or just copy — from this page. In Microsoft Word two hyphens typed between two words turn into an em dash automatically when you finish the next word, and Ctrl + Alt + the number-pad minus inserts one directly; Ctrl + the number-pad minus gives an en dash. Google Docs replaces -- with — as you type.

On a Mac press Shift + Option + hyphen for an em dash and Option + hyphen for an en dash; this works in every app. On an iPhone or iPad touch and hold the hyphen key on the keyboard and slide to – or — in the pop-up; the same long press on Android's Gboard shows the dashes too. On a Chromebook or Linux desktop press Ctrl + Shift + U, type 2014 and press Enter or space; with a Compose key, Compose, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen gives — and Compose, hyphen, hyphen, full stop gives –.

Since 2024 the em dash has become a supposed sign of AI-written text, because chatbots use it far more often than most people do. It is a perfectly good mark that writers have used for centuries, so use it where a break in the sentence needs it, and simply use it less if you are worried about the impression.

The other dashes: figure dash, horizontal bar, two-em and three-em dashes

Unicode has more dashes than most keyboards will ever show. The figure dash ‒ is exactly as wide as a digit, so phone numbers and codes like 555‒0199 keep their columns aligned. The horizontal bar ― is the quotation dash that opens a line of dialogue in French, Spanish, Russian, Polish and many other languages, where English would use quotation marks. The two-em dash ⸺ stands for a missing name or an omitted word (Mr ⸺ of ⸺shire), and the three-em dash ⸻ replaces an author's name in a bibliography when the same person wrote the previous entry.

Two invisible-looking hyphens matter in careful typesetting. The non-breaking hyphen ‑ looks like an ordinary hyphen but never lets a line break after it, so 'e‑mail' or a model number stays on one line; Word inserts it with Ctrl + Shift + hyphen. The soft hyphen has no page here because it has no visible shape: it marks where a long word may be broken at the end of a line and only appears when that break happens. The hyphenation point ‧ is the dot dictionaries use to show syllables (dic‧tion‧ar‧y), and the hyphen bullet ⁃ is a hyphen made for the start of a list item.

Printers and scripts have their own hyphens. The double oblique hyphen ⸗ is the slanted two-stroke hyphen of old German blackletter books, and the straight double hyphen ⹀ comes from the same tradition. Hebrew joins words with the maqaf ־, which sits high on the line; Armenian has ֊, and Japanese dictionaries separate parts of a foreign name in katakana with the double hyphen ゠. The ties ⁀ ‿ ⁔ are not dashes at all but linking marks from phonetics and manuscript editing, and they are loved in kaomoji and aesthetic names for their curve.

Wave dash 〜, tilde ~ and the squiggly dash 〰️

The wave dash 〜 is the Japanese dash: it marks ranges (9時〜17時), stretches a sound in casual writing (ね〜), and gives a softer, friendlier tone than a straight line. The fullwidth tilde ～ looks almost the same and is what Windows produced for the same key in Japanese text for years, so both are in use; in a Japanese font they are interchangeable to the eye, but a search for one will not find the other. Outside Japan the wave dash doubles as a cute divider or a 'roughly' sign in bios and usernames.

The keyboard tilde ~ means 'about' (~5 minutes), 'at home' in web addresses and 'not' or 'matches' in code; in maths the proper characters are the tilde operator ∼ and the swung dash ⁓, which dictionaries use to stand for the headword. The emoji wavy dash 〰️ is the one that renders as a colourful squiggle on phones, used for waves, vibrations and decorative lines. For spirals, loops and approximation signs see the Spiral, Swirl & Wave Symbols collection.

Underscores, overlines and straight rules for dividers

The underscore _ is the low line of usernames, file names and snake_case; the fullwidth ＿ is its wide East Asian twin, and ‗ is a double low line. The dashed ﹍, centreline ﹎ and wavy ﹏ low lines come from East Asian typography, where wavy underlining marks a book title, and ﹏﹏﹏ makes a soft water-like divider in aesthetic bios. Above the line sit the overline ‾, the macron ¯, the fullwidth ￣ (the shrug's shoulders in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and the dashed, centreline and wavy overlines ﹉ ﹊ ﹋ ﹌.

For a long straight rule, repeat a box-drawing line: light ─, heavy ━ or double ═ join without gaps, and the dashed versions ╌ ┄ ┈ and ╍ ┅ ┉ give two, three or four dashes per character. The four lines ⎺ ⎻ ⎼ ⎽ sit at different heights because they come from the VT100 terminal's graphics set, which is how screens of the late 1970s and 1980s drew forms, and today they let you place a rule exactly where you want it; ⎯ is the long line extension from the maths block. The full set of corners, tees and crosses lives in the Box Drawing & Line Symbols collection, and ready-made ornamental dividers are in Bullet Point & Divider Symbols.

Three letters are often mistaken for dashes. The katakana prolonged sound mark ー (and its halfwidth ｰ) lengthens a vowel in Japanese words like コーヒー 'coffee'; the Korean vowel ㅡ is a flat line that Korean chat uses for squinting, unimpressed eyes (ㅡㅡ). They look like dashes, so they are here for copying, but do not use them as punctuation in Japanese or Korean text. In vertical East Asian text the em dash, en dash, low line and wavy low line turn to stand upright as ︱ ︲ ︳ ︴.