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hyphen-minus

Hyphen-minus

This is the plain keyboard dash: it joins words, as in English well-known, and stands in for a minus sign in plain text. One key does several jobs, but polished typography and code have different rules.

Text symbol
Search it as
dash · hyphen · minus
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What - means

A keyboard hyphen is not every kind of dash.

For typeset text, choose the mark for the job: a hyphen joins words; dedicated dashes mark ranges or sentence breaks; a mathematical minus handles subtraction.

In basic JavaScript regular-expression character classes, placement changes meaning: [a-z] matches a letter in a range, while [-az] matches a literal hyphen, a or z.

Ordinary punctuation, not an emoji or a tone signal by itself.

Do not prettify commands or code by replacing - with a typographic dash or minus.

Don't confuse it with

3
–
En Dash
En dash: a range, as in 10–20.
—
Em Dash
Em dash: a sentence break, especially in English.
−
Minus Sign
Mathematical minus: for typeset calculations.

Questions people ask

1

Why 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 002D, 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 “hyphen-minus”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 002d, then Enter or Space.
HTML
-
CSS
\002D
US keyboard
Press the hyphen key to the right of 0, without Shift. Other layouts vary.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
-
HTML hex
-
CSS content
content: "\002D";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
-
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
1
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Typography & punctuation332 symbols

‼️❗⁉️❓❔❕〰️!"#%&