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Character reference

Every dash symbol — copy, compare and identify

Eleven dash-like characters, with code points and HTML entities. Click any card to copy, or paste a line into the identifier below to find out which dashed you are looking at.

Em Dash family

The long dashes — for asides, interruptions and full-width rules.

En Dash family

The middle-length dashes – for ranges, scores and connections.

Hyphen family

The short joiners - for compound words, names and codes.

Which dash is in my text?

Paste a line — or a single character you cannot identify — and every dash inside it is named here. Nothing is uploaded; the check runs in your browser.

Paste a character or a line above and the dashes it contains will be listed here.

The full dash reference table

Name, glyph, code point, HTML entity and the job each character does.

GlyphNameUnicodeHTMLUsed for
Em DashU+2014—The standard em dash, one em wide (the width of a capital M) and the dash writers reach for by default.
Horizontal BarU+2015―Visually identical to the em dash and used as a quotation dash in some house styles. Editors treat the two as interchangeable.
Two-em DashU+2E3A—Two em dashes joined, marking a name whose letters are missing — censored or unknown.
Three-em DashU+2E3B—Three em dashes, used in bibliographies for a repeated author or entry.
En DashU+2013–Half the width of an em dash. Marks ranges and spans: 2018–2022, pages 44–48, a 3–0 win.
Figure DashU+2012—A rare relative of the en dash that is exactly one digit wide, so columns of numbers stay aligned.
Minus SignU+2212−The true mathematical minus, aligned with the plus sign. Not a dash — but the correct character for −5 °C.
Hyphen-minusU+002D—The plain keyboard hyphen. ASCII, universally accepted, and the safe stand-in for every other dash.
Unicode HyphenU+2010—A typographic hyphen that looks identical to the keyboard hyphen but fails plain-ASCII validators.
Non-breaking HyphenU+2011—A hyphen a word processor must not break a line at — ideal for phone numbers and part numbers.
Soft HyphenU+00AD­Invisible until a line break needs it. Copied PDF text is full of them, and they fragment search results.

Three of these characters cover 99% of real text: the hyphen for joining, the en dash for ranges and the em dash for interruptions. The rest exist because typesetting, mathematics and PDF export each needed a dash of their own — which is precisely why text pasted between tools arrives carrying characters nobody typed.

Fix the dashes you found

Whatever the identifier above turned up, there is a one-click tool for it.

Em Dash Tool

Remove, replace or count every em dash and horizontal bar.

En Dash Tool

Turn ranges such as 2018–2022 into 2018-2022, or write “to” for prose.

Hyphen Tool

Catch the Unicode, non-breaking and invisible soft hyphens that arrive from PDFs.

Remove All Dashes

Every family at once, for a fully ASCII result.

Convert Dashes

Em dash ⇄ en dash ⇄ hyphen, swapped in place.

AI Dash Remover

Em dashes plus the typed “--” and “---” that models emit.

Questions

How many dash characters are there?
In Unicode there are more than a dozen that render as a horizontal line; eleven are common enough to matter in everyday editing. Three of them do the work: the hyphen (U+002D), the en dash (U+2013) and the em dash (U+2014). The rest are variations — the horizontal bar, the figure dash, the two- and three-em dashes, the Unicode and non-breaking hyphens, the soft hyphen and the mathematical minus sign.
Which dash is which — how do I tell them apart?
Paste the character into the identifier on this page and it will name it, with its code point. By eye: the hyphen is shortest, the en dash is about the width of an n, and the em dash is about the width of an M. The horizontal bar (U+2015) looks identical to the em dash — only a code-point check separates them.
Why does copy-pasted text contain dashes that look identical to a hyphen?
Because word processors and PDFs substitute typographic characters freely. A hyphen copied from a PDF is often the Unicode hyphen (U+2010) or a non-breaking hyphen (U+2011); text from a typesetting pipeline may carry the figure dash (U+2012) or a horizontal bar (U+2015). They look the same in nearly every font, and they are different characters to a validator, a database or a search index.
Is the minus sign the same as a dash?
No. The minus sign (−, U+2212) is the mathematical character: it is aligned with the plus sign and correctly spaced in equations. The hyphen is a spelling device. For anything a reader will do arithmetic with, use the minus sign; for a plain-text field that has to stay ASCII, use the hyphen.
What is a soft hyphen for?
A soft hyphen (U+00AD) tells a renderer where a word may be broken across lines, and stays invisible until it is. It is useful in typeset documents and a nuisance everywhere else: copied PDF text is full of them, they cannot be typed into a find-and-replace box, and they fragment search results. The hyphen remover deletes them.
Which dash should I use in HTML?
Use the entity so the source stays readable: — for the em dash, – for the en dash, ­ for a soft hyphen, − for the minus sign. The hyphen needs no entity — just type -. For non-breaking and Unicode hyphens there is no named entity, so paste the character itself or use a numeric reference.