What ⎼ means
It marks row seven in an old terminal’s drawing grid.
DEC’s VT100, introduced in 1978, used it in its Special Graphics set for boxes and other text graphics.
Unicode keeps the scan-line characters for terminal compatibility: ⎺ marks row 1, ⎻ row 3, and ⎽ row 9; row 5 uses the ordinary box-drawing line ─.
Technical; it signals legacy terminal graphics.
Do not read it as dash 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 ⎼
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 23BC, then Alt+X to get ⎼.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “horizontal scan line-7”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 23bc, then Enter or Space.
HTML
⎼CSS
\23BCUnicode escape
In code that supports Unicode escapes, write `\u23BC`.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
⎼
HTML hex
⎼
CSS content
content: "\23BC";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E2%8E%BC
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.