What ⎺ means
It drew the first, topmost horizontal stroke in a terminal cell.
Older text terminals stored such strokes in built-in character memory and joined them across neighboring fixed-size cells to make graphics. A nine-row drawing grid supplied the stroke positions; ⎺ marked its top row.
This set of terminal-graphic characters was proposed for Unicode in 2000, after the strokes were already used in hardware. Its fixed height is why it reads differently from ordinary punctuation.
Why does ⎺ sit higher than a dash?
Its height marks a specific row in the cell.
A dash is placed for text; this stroke is positioned to meet terminal artwork in neighboring cells. If a font shifts or substitutes it, the line may no longer align.
Technical and niche: it reads as old terminal graphics, not conversational punctuation.
It can be mistaken for a dash; don't use it as ordinary punctuation.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ⎺ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ⎺
⎺\23BACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.