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The dash is a mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the ; the emdash , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontalbar , whose length varies across but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.

Typical uses of dashes are to mark a break in a sentence, to set off an explanatory remark (similar to parenthesis), or to show spans of time or ranges of values.

The em dash is sometimes used as a leading character to identify the source of a quoted text.

History
In the early 17th century, in -printed plays of William Shakespeare, dashes are attested that indicate a thinking pause, interruption, mid-speech realization, or change of subject.
(2025). 9780521562577, Cambridge University Press. .
The dashes are variously longer (as in reprinted 1619) or composed of hyphens (as in printed 1622); moreover, the dashes are often, but not always, prefixed by a comma, colon, or semicolon.
(1982). 9780521226349, Cambridge University Press. .

In 1733, in 's On Poetry, the terms break and dash are attested for and marks:

Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline; Be mindful, when Invention fails; To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

Your poem finish'd, next your Care Is needful, to transcribe it fair. In modern Wit all printed Trash, is Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—

Types of dash
Usage varies both within English and within other languages, but the usual conventions for the most common dashes in printed English text are these:

  • An (unspaced) em dash or a spaced en dash can be used to mark a break in a sentence, and a pair can be used to set off a parenthetical phrase. For example:

  • An en dash, but not an em dash, indicates spans or differentiation, where it may replace "and", "to", or "through". For example:

  • An em dash or horizontal bar, but not an en dash, is used to set off the source of a direct . For example:

  • A horizontal bar (also called quotation dash) or the em dash, but not the en dash, introduces quoted text.
  • In informal contexts, a () is often used as a substitute for an endash, as is a pair of hyphen-minuses () for an emdash, because the hyphen-minus symbol is readily available on most keyboards. The facility of word-processing software often corrects these to the typographically correct form of dash.

Figure dash
The figure dash () has the same width as a numerical digit. (Many have digits of equal width.) It is used within numbers, such as the phone number 555‒0199, especially in columns so as to maintain alignment. In contrast, the en dash () is generally used for a range of values.
(2025). 9780596101213, O'Reilly Media. .

The () is generally set a little higher, so as to be level with the horizontal bar of the . In informal usage, the (), provided as standard on most keyboards, is often used instead of the figure dash.

In , the standard fonts have no figure dash; however, the digits normally all have the same width as the en dash, so an en dash can be a substitution for the figure dash. In , one can use \char"2012. The font also has the figure dash glyph.

En dash
The en dash, en rule, or nut dash is traditionally half the width of an em dash.
(1980). 9780821829974, AMS Bookstore. .
In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, and the en dash is often more than half the width of the em dash.
(2025). 9780470542514, John Wiley & Sons. .
The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the uppercase letters N and M, respectively,
(2025). 9780538445276, Cengage Learning. .
(2025). 9780321385444, Adobe Press. .
and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters.
(1991). 9780671707972, Simon & Schuster. .

Usage
The three main uses of the en dash are:

  1. to connect symmetric items, such as the two ends of a range or two competitors or alternatives
  2. to contrast values or illustrate a relationship between two things
  3. to compound attributes, where one of the connected items is itself a compound

Ranges of values
The en dash is commonly used to indicate a closed range of valuesa range with clearly defined and finite upper and lower boundariesroughly signifying what might otherwise be communicated by the word "through" in American English, or "to" in International English.Lamb, David. " Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes: Correct Usage". Academic Writing Tutor. Retrieved 2 September 2013. This may include ranges such as those between dates, times, or numbers.
(2025). 9780764126901, Barron's Educational Series.
(2025). 9781560526087, Crisp Publications.
(2025). 9780764564888, Hungry Minds. .
Various restrict this range indication style to only parenthetical or tabular matter, requiring "to" or "through" in running text. Preference for hyphen vs. en dash in ranges varies. For example, the (named after the American Psychological Association) uses an en dash in ranges, but the AMA style (named after the American Medical Association) uses a hyphen:

June and July 1967
1:15 to 2:15 p.m.
For ages 3 through 5
pages 38 through 55
President Jimmy Carter, in office from 1977 to 1981

Some style guides (including the Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) and the AMA Manual of Style) recommend that, when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, the word "to" should be used instead of an en dash. For example, "a voltage of 50 V to 100 V" is preferable to using "a voltage of 50–100 V". Relatedly, in ranges that include negative numbers, "to" is used to avoid ambiguity or awkwardness (for example, "temperatures ranged from −18°C to −34°C"). It is also considered poor style (best avoided) to use the en dash in place of the words "to" or "and" in phrases that follow the forms from X to Y and between X and Y.

Relationships and connections
The en dash is used to contrast values or illustrate a relationship between two things. Examples of this usage include:

  • Australia beat American Samoa 31–0.
  • Radical–Unionist coalition
  • Boston–Hartford route
  • New York–London flight (however, it may be argued that New York–to-London flight is more appropriate because New York is a single name composed of two valid words; with a single en dash, the phrase is ambiguous and could mean either Flight from New York to London or New flight from York to London; such ambiguity is assuaged when used mid-sentence, though, because of the capital N in "New" indicating it is a special noun). If dash–hyphen use becomes too unwieldy or difficult to understand, the sentence can be rephrased for clarity and readability; for example, "The flight from New York to London was a pleasant experience".
  • Mother–daughter relationship
  • The voted 5–4 to uphold the decision.

A distinction is often made between "simple" attributive compounds (written with a hyphen) and other subtypes (written with an en dash); at least one authority considers name pairs, where the paired elements carry equal weight, as in the Taft–Hartley Act to be "simple", while others consider an en dash appropriate in instances such as these

(2025). 9780195161915, Oxford University Press. .
(2025). 9780226284187, University of Chicago Press. .
(1998). 9780201379211, Addison Wesley Longman. .
to represent the parallel relationship, as in the McCain–Feingold bill or Bose–Einstein statistics. When an act of the U.S. Congress is named using the surnames of the senator and representative who sponsored it, the hyphen-minus is used in the ; thus, the short title of Public Law 111–203 is "The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act", with a rather than an en dash between "Dodd" and "Frank". However, there is a difference between something named for a parallel/coordinate relationship between two people for example, Satyendra Nath Bose and and something named for a single person who had a , which may be written with a hyphen or a space but not an en dashfor example, the Lennard-Jones potential hyphen is named after one person (John Lennard-Jones), as are Bence Jones proteins and Hughlings Jackson syndrome. Copyeditors use dictionaries (general, medical, biographical, and geographical) to confirm the (and thus the styling) for specific terms, given that no one can know them all offhand.

Preference for an en dash instead of a hyphen in these coordinate/relationship/connection types of terms is a matter of style, not inherent orthographic "correctness"; both are equally "correct", and each is the preferred style in some style guides. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the AMA Manual of Style, and Dorland's medical reference works use hyphens, not en dashes, in coordinate terms (such as "blood-brain barrier"), in (such as "Cheyne-Stokes respiration", "Kaplan-Meier method"), and so on. In other styles, AP Style or Chicago Style, the en dash is used to describe two closely related entities in a formal manner.

Attributive compounds
In English, the en dash is usually used instead of a in compound (phrasal) attributives in which one or both elements is itself a compound, especially when the compound element is an , meaning it is not itself hyphenated. This manner of usage may include such examples as:
(2025). 9780618604999, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. .
(2025). 9781582973357, Writer's Digest Books. .

  • The hospital–nursing home connection (the connection between the hospital and the nursing home, not a home connection between the hospital and nursing)
  • A nursing home–home care policy (a policy about the nursing home and home care)
  • Pre–Civil War era
  • Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
  • New York–style pizza
  • The non–San Francisco part of the world
  • The post–World War II era
    • (Compare era, which, if not fully compounded ( postwar), takes a hyphen, not an en dash. The difference is that war is not an open compound, whereas World War II is.)
  • Trans–New Guinea languages
  • The ex–prime minister
  • a long–focal length camera
  • water ice–based bedrock
  • The pro-conscription–anti-conscription debate
  • Public-school–private-school rivalries

The disambiguating value of the en dash in these patterns was illustrated by Strunk and White in The Elements of Style with the following example: When Chattanooga News and Chattanooga Free Press merged, the joint company was inaptly named Chattanooga News-Free Press (using a hyphen), which could be interpreted as meaning that their newspapers were news-free.

An exception to the use of en dashes is usually made when an already-; an en dash is generally avoided as a distraction in this case. Examples of this include:

(2025). 9780520218345, University of California Press. .

  • non-English-speaking air traffic controllers
  • semi-labor-intensive industries
  • Proto-Indo-European language
  • The post- era
  • non-government-owned corporations

An en dash can be retained to avoid ambiguity, but whether any ambiguity is plausible is a judgment call. AMA style retains the en dashes in the following examples:

  • non–self-governing
  • non–English-language journals
  • non–group-specific blood
  • non–Q-wave myocardial infarction
  • non–brain-injured subjects

Differing recommendations
As discussed above, the en dash is sometimes recommended instead of a hyphen in compound adjectives where neither part of the adjective modifies the other—that is, when each modifies the noun, as in love–hate relationship.

The Chicago Manual of Style ( CMOS), however, limits the use of the en dash to two main purposes:

  • First, use it to indicate ranges of time, money, or other amounts, or in certain other cases where it replaces the word "to".
  • Second, use it in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of the elements of the adjective is an open compound, or when two or more of its elements are compounds, open or hyphenated.
    (2025). 9780226104034, University of Chicago Press.

That is, the CMOS favors hyphens in instances where some other guides suggest en dashes, with the 16th edition explaining that "Chicago's sense of the en dash does not extend to between", to rule out its use in "US–Canadian relations".

In these two uses, en dashes normally do not have spaces around them. Some make an exception when they believe avoiding spaces may cause confusion or look odd. For example, compare with .

(1986). 9780060970475, Harper & Row. .
However, other authorities disagree and state there should be no space between an en dash and adjacent text. These authorities would not use a space in, for example, The Punctuation Guide, "En dash" . or .Nancy Tuten, "Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes: When to Use Them and How to Type Them" , Get It Write, 26 June 2019.
(2025). 9781429977494, Holt Paperbacks. .

Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level
En dashes can be used instead of pairs of commas that mark off a nested clause or phrase. They can also be used around parenthetical expressions such as this one rather than the em dashes preferred by some publishers.

The en dash can also signify a rhetorical pause. For example, an from is entitled:

Who is to blame for the sweltering weather? My kids say it's boomersand me

In these situations, en dashes must have a single space on each side.

Typography
Spacing
In most uses of en dashes, such as when used in indicating ranges, they are typeset closed up to the adjacent words or numbers. Examples include "the 191418war" or "the DoverCalais crossing". It is only when en dashes are used in setting off parenthetical expressionssuch as this onethat they take spaces around them. For more on the choice of em versus en in this context, see En dash versus em dash.

Encoding and substitution
When an en dash is unavailable in a particular character encoding environment—as in the character set—there are some conventional substitutions. Often two consecutive hyphens are the substitute.

The en dash is encoded in Unicode as U+2013 (decimal 8211) and represented in HTML by the –.

The en dash is sometimes used as a substitute for the , when the minus sign character is not available since the en dash is usually the same width as a plus sign and is often available when the minus sign is not; see below. For example, the original 8-bit Macintosh Character Set had an en dash, useful for the minus sign, years before Unicode with a dedicated minus sign was available. The hyphen-minus is usually too narrow to make a typographically acceptable minus sign. However, the en dash cannot be used for a minus sign in programming languages because the syntax usually requires a hyphen-minus.

Itemization mark
Either the en dash or the em dash may be used as a bullet at the start of each item in a bulleted list.

Em dash
The em dash, em rule, or mutton dash is longer than an en dash. The character is called an em dash because it is one em wide, a length that varies depending on the font size. One em is the same length as the font's height (which is typically measured in points). So in 9-point type, an em dash is nine points wide, while in 24-point type the em dash is 24 points wide. By comparison, the en dash, with its width, is in most either a half-em wide
(2025). 9780198691754, Oxford University Press.
or the width of an upper-case "N".
(2025). 9781592534470, Rockport. .

The em dash is encoded in Unicode as U+2014 (decimal 8212) and represented in HTML by the named character entity —.

Usage
The em dash is used in several ways. It is primarily used in places where a set of parentheses or a colon might otherwise be used, and it can also show an abrupt change in thought (or an interruption in speech) or be used where a (period) is too strong and a comma is too weak (similar to that of a semicolon). Em dashes are also used to set off summaries or definitions.
(2025). 9780764599163, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. .
Common uses and definitions are cited below with examples.

Colon-like use
Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of colon and em dash
  • Three alkali metals are the usual substituents: sodium, potassium, and lithium.
  • Three alkali metals are the usual substituents—sodium, potassium, and lithium.

Inversion of the function of a colon
  • These are the colors of the flag: red, white, and blue.
  • Red, white, and blue—these are the colors of the flag.

Parenthesis-like use
Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of paired parenthetical marks
  • Compare parentheses with em dashes:
    • Three alkali metals (sodium, potassium, and lithium) are the usual substituents.
    • Three alkali metals—sodium, potassium, and lithium—are the usual substituents.
  • Compare commas, em dashes and parentheses (respectively) when no internal commas intervene:
    • The food, which was delicious, reminded me of home.
    • The food—which was delicious—reminded me of home.
    • The food (which was delicious) reminded me of home.

Subtle differences in punctuation
It may indicate an interpolation stronger than that demarcated by parentheses, as in the following from 's (the degree of difference is subjective).

  • "At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons."

Interruption of a speaker
Interruption by someone else
  • "But I'm trying to explain that I—"
    "I'm aware of your mitigating circumstances, but your negative attitude was excessive."

In a related use, it may visually indicate the shift between speakers when they overlap in speech. For example, the em dash is used this way in 's Catch-22:

  • He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. He was—
    "Crazy!" Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. "That's what you are! Crazy!"
    "—immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman."

Self-interruption
  • Simple revision of a statement as one's thoughts evolve on the fly:
    • "I believe I shall— no, I'm going to do it."
  • Contemplative or emotional trailing off (usually in or in first person narrative):
    • "I sense something; a presence I've not felt since—" in .
    • "Get out or else—"
Either an or an em dash can indicate , the rhetorical device by which a sentence is stopped short not because of interruption, but because the speaker is too emotional or pensive to continue. Because the ellipsis is the more common choice, an em dash for this purpose may be ambiguous in expository text, as many readers would assume interruption, although it may be used to indicate great emotion in dramatic .
  • Long pause:
    • In Early Modern English texts and afterward, em dashes have been used to add long pauses (as noted in Joseph Robertson's 1785 An Essay on Punctuation):
:

Quotation
Quotation mark–like use
This is a . It may be distinct from an em dash in its coding (see horizontal bar). It may be used to indicate turns in a dialogue, in which case each dash starts a paragraph. It replaces other quotation marks and was preferred by authors such as :
—O saints above! miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I wished I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet.
—O, miss Douce! miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing!

Attribution of quote source
  • Inline quotes:
    • A penny saved is a penny earned. —Benjamin Franklin
  • Block quotes:

Redaction
An em dash may be used to indicate omitted letters in a word redacted to an initial or single letter or to fillet a word, by leaving the start and end letters whilst replacing the middle letters with a dash or dashes (for censorship or simply data anonymization). It may also censor the end letter. In this use, it is sometimes doubled.

  • It was alleged that D—— had been threatened with blackmail.

Three em dashes might be used to indicate a completely missing word.

Itemization mark
Either the en dash or the em dash may be used as a bullet at the start of each item in a bulleted list, but a plain hyphen is more commonly used.

Repetition
Three em dashes one after another can be used in a footnote, endnote, or another form of bibliographic entry to indicate repetition of the same author's name as that of the previous work, His Pete's Guide website has an updated version: Version 2.0—May 27, 2002 . which is similar to the use of Idem]]

Typographic details
Spacing and substitution
According to most American sources (such as The Chicago Manual of Style) and some British sources (such as The Oxford Guide to Style), an em dash should always be set closed, meaning it should not be surrounded by spaces. But the practice in some parts of the English-speaking world, including the style recommended by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage for printed newspapers and the , sets it open, separating it from its surrounding words by using spaces or (U+200A) when it is being used parenthetically.Yagoda, Ben. " Mad Dash ". The New York Times. 22 October 2012. Accessed 31 May 2016. The AP Stylebook rejects the use of the open em dash to set off introductory items in lists. However, the "space, en dash, space" sequence is the predominant style in German and French . (See En dash versus em dash below.)

In Canada, The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, The Oxford Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling & Punctuation: Guide to Canadian English Usage (2nd ed.), Editing Canadian English, and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary all specify that an em dash should be set closed when used between words, a word and numeral, or two numerals.

The Australian government's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers (6th ed.), also specifies that em dashes inserted between words, a word and numeral, or two numerals, should be set closed. A section on the 2-em rule (⸺) also explains that the 2-em can be used to mark an abrupt break in direct or reported speech, but a space is used before the 2-em if a complete word is missing, while no space is used if part of a word exists before the sudden break. Two examples of this are as follows:

  • I distinctly heard him say, "Go away or I'll ——".
  • It was alleged that D—— had been threatened with blackmail.

Approximating the em dash with two or three hyphens
When an em dash is unavailable in a particular character encoding environment—as in the character set—it has usually been approximated as consecutive double (--) or triple (---) hyphen-minuses. The two-hyphen em dash proxy is perhaps more common, being a widespread convention in the era. (It is still described for hard copy manuscript preparation in The Chicago Manual of Style as of the 16th edition, although the manual conveys that typewritten manuscript and copyediting on paper are now dated practices.) The three-hyphen em dash proxy was popular with various publishers because the sequence of one, two, or three hyphens could then correspond to the hyphen, en dash, and em dash, respectively.

Because early comic book were not aware of the typographic convention of replacing a typewritten double hyphen with an em dash, the double hyphen became traditional in American comics. This practice has continued despite the development of computer lettering.

En dash versus em dash
The en dash is wider than the but not as wide as the em dash. An em width is defined as the point size of the currently used font, since the M character is not always the width of the point size. In running text, various dash conventions are employed: an em dash—like so—or a spaced em dash — like so — or a spaced en dashlike socan be seen in contemporary publications.

Various style guides and national varieties of languages prescribe different guidance on dashes. Dashes have been cited as being treated differently in the US and the UK, with the former preferring the use of an em dash with no additional spacing and the latter preferring a spaced en dash.

(2025). 9780500288948, Thames and Hudson.
As examples of the US style, The Chicago Manual of Style and recommend unspaced em dashes. Style guides outside the US are more variable. For example, The Elements of Typographic Style by Canadian typographer Robert Bringhurst recommends the spaced en dashlike soand argues that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash "belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography".
(2025). 9780881792065, Hartley & Marks, Publishers. .
In the United Kingdom, the spaced en dash is the house style for certain major publishers, including the , the Cambridge University Press, and . However, this convention is not universal. The Oxford Guide to Style (2002, section 5.10.10) acknowledges that the spaced en dash is used by "other British publishers" but states that the Oxford University Press, like "most US publishers", uses the unspaced em dash. Fowler's Modern English Usage, saying that it is summarising the New Hart's Rules, describes the principal uses of the em dash as "a single dash used to introduce an explanation or expansion" and "a pair of dashes used to indicate asides and parentheses", without stipulating whether it should be spaced but giving only unspaced examples.
(2025). 9780199661350, Oxford University Press.

The en dashalways with spaces in running text when, as discussed in this section, indicating a parenthesis or pauseand the spaced em dash both have a certain technical advantage over the unspaced em dash. Most typesetting and word processing expects word spacing to vary to support full justification. Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables this for the words it falls between. This can cause uneven spacing in the text, but can be mitigated by the use of , , or even on the sides of the em dash. This provides the appearance of an unspaced em dash, but allows the words and dashes to break between lines. The spaced em dash risks introducing excessive separation of words. In full justification, the adjacent spaces may be stretched, and the separation of words further exaggerated. En dashes may also be preferred to em dashes when text is set in narrow columns, such as in newspapers and similar publications, since the en dash is smaller. In such cases, its use is based purely on space considerations and is not necessarily related to other typographical concerns.

On the other hand, a spaced en dash may be ambiguous when it is also used for ranges, for example, in dates or between geographical locations with internal spaces.

Horizontal bar
The horizontal bar (), also known as a quotation dash, is used to introduce quoted text. This is the standard method of printing in some languages. The em dash is equally suitable if the quotation dash is unavailable or is contrary to the house style being used.

There is no support in the standard TeX fonts, but one can use or an em dash.

Swung dash
The swung dash () resembles a lengthened and is used to separate alternatives or approximates. In , it is frequently used to stand in for the term being defined. A dictionary entry providing an example for the term henceforth might employ the swung dash as follows:

henceforth (adv.) from this time forth; from now on; "⁓ she will be known as Mrs. Wales"

Unicode
In the following tables, the "Em and 5×" column uses a capital M as a standard comparison to demonstrate the vertical position of different Unicode dash characters. "5×" means that there are five copies of this type of dash.

Unicode dash characters
This table lists characters with property in Unicode."Dashes and Hyphens" in
(2022). 9781936213320, The Unicode Consortium.

> M----- The [[ASCII]] hyphen. Sometimes this is used in groups to indicate different types of dash. In programming languages it is used as the [[minus sign]].
> M‐‐‐‐‐ The character that can be used to unambiguously represent a hyphen.
> M‑‑‑‑‑ compound noun]] of single-letter abbreviations and full nouns, as "E-Mail").
> M‒‒‒‒‒ Similar to an en dash, but with exactly the width of a digit in the chosen typeface. The vertical position may also be centered on the zero digit, and thus higher than the en dash and em dash, which are appropriate for use with lowercase text in a vertical position similar to the hyphen. The figure dash may therefore be preferred to the en dash for indicating a closed range of values.
> M–––––
> M—————
> M―――――
> M⁓⁓⁓⁓⁓
> M⁻⁻⁻⁻⁻ Usually is used together with superscripted numbers.
> M Usually is used together with subscripted numbers.
> M−−−−− An [[arithmetic]] operation used in [[mathematics]] to represent [[subtraction]] or [[negative number]]s. Its glyph is consistent with the glyph of the plus sign, and it is centred on the zero digit, unlike the ASCII hyphen-minus and , that (especially the latter) are designed to match lowercase letters and are inconsistent with arithmetic operators.
Used in ancient Near-Eastern linguistics.
Used mostly in German dictionaries and indicates umlaut of the stem vowel of a plural form.
> Supplemental Punctuation.
>
Used in the transcription of old German manuscripts.
Used in medieval European manuscripts.
M〜〜〜〜〜Wavy lines found in some East Asian . Typographically, they have the width of one character frame (), and follow the direction of the text, being horizontal for horizontal text, and vertical for columnar. They are used as dashes, and occasionally as emphatic variants of the vowel extender mark.
M〰〰〰〰〰
Compatibility characters used in East Asian typography.
M﹘﹘﹘﹘﹘
M﹣﹣﹣﹣﹣
M－－－－－

Related characters
This table lists characters similar to dashes, but with property in Unicode.

> M_____ Glyph]]; therefore, whether sequences of this character connect depends on the [[font]] used. See also
> M~~~~~ Glyph]] varies, therefore for punctuation in running text the use of more specific characters is preferred, see above.
> Used to indicate where a line ''may'' break, as in a compound word or between syllables.
> M¯¯¯¯¯ A horizontal line positioned at [[cap height]] usually having the same length as . It is a spacing character, related to the diacritic mark "macron". A sequence of such characters is not expected to connect, unlike .
> Mˉˉˉˉˉ A phonetic symbol (a line applied above the base letter).
> Mˍˍˍˍˍ A phonetic symbol (a line applied below the base letter).
> M˗˗˗˗˗ A variant of the [[minus sign]] used in phonetics to mark a retracted or backed articulation. It may show small end-[[serif]]s.
> M˜˜˜˜˜ A spacing clone of tilde diacritic mark.
> M‾‾‾‾‾ A character similar to , but a sequence of such characters usually connects.
> M⁃⁃⁃⁃⁃ A short horizontal line used as a list bullet.
> M Used in mathematics. Ends not curved as much regular tilde. In [[TeX]] and [[LaTeX]], this character can be expressed using the math mode command $\sim$.
> M⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Miscellaneous Technical (Unicode block). "Used for extension of arrows".[https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf Miscellaneous Technical] Can be used in sequences to generate long connected horizontal lines.
> M⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺ "Refer to old, low-resolution technology for terminals, with only 9 scan lines per fixed-size character glyph". The scan line-5 is unified with .
> M⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻
> M⎼⎼⎼⎼⎼
> M⎽⎽⎽⎽⎽
> M⏤⏤⏤⏤⏤ Miscellaneous Technical (Unicode block). Represents line [[straightness]] in technical context.
> M───── Box-drawing characters. Several similar characters from one Unicode block used to draw horizontal lines.
> M━━━━━
> Bagua]] or hexagrams.
>
> M➖➖➖➖➖ [[Unicode symbols]].
textual symbol, usually displayed by a long low line.
letters used in to denote the sound . The halfwidth form is a compatibility character used in East Asian typography.
Japanese chōonpu, used in Japanese to indicate a long vowel. The halfwidth form is a compatibility character used in East Asian typography.
Chinese character for "one", used in various East Asian languages.
Looks like a sequence of a hyphen and a (period).
Compatibility character used in East Asian typography.
A symbol for an unit of length.
Symbols for
for "one".
A symbol for that indicates the end of a sentence.
Used to form a large text charecter in legacy computing.
digit for "one", used in calculation in ancient East Asia.
A based on segments from the Chinese character "正".
for "five".

In other languages
In many languages, such as , the em dash is used as an opening quotation mark. There is no matching closing quotation mark; typically a new paragraph will be started, introduced by a dash, for each turn in the dialogue.

Corpus studies indicate that em dashes are more commonly used in Russian than in English.

(2025). 9789027231901, John Benjamins Publishing. .
In Russian, the em dash is used for the present copula (meaning 'am/is/are'), which is unpronounced in spoken Russian.

In and , em or en dashes can be used as (brackets), but the use of a second dash as a closing parenthesis is optional. When a closing dash is not used, the sentence is ended with a period (full-stop) as usual. Dashes are, however, much less common than parentheses.

In , em dashes can be used to mark off parenthetical phrases. Unlike in English, the em dashes are spaced like brackets, i.e., there is a space between main sentence and dash, but not between parenthetical phrase and dash. For example: "Llevaba la fidelidad a su maestro buen hasta extremos insospechados." (In English: 'He took his loyalty to his teacher – a good teacher – to unsuspected extremes.')

See also
  • – dashes preceded by colons, semicolons, commas or full stops
  • Leiden Conventions – rules to indicate conditions in texts (usage of "—")
  • – signature delimiter in emails (usage of "-- " in a single line)
  • Whitespace characters – spaces of equivalent sizes to dashes

Explanatory notes
External links

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