Copy & paste · Character reference
The figure dash (‒): a dash that is exactly one digit wide
Copy the figure dash (U+2012) in one click — the tabular twin of the en dash, designed so that columns of figures stay aligned.
Or select it by hand
Click the box to select the character, then press Ctrl + C (⌘ + C on Mac).
- Character
- Figure Dash
- Unicode
- U+2012
- HTML entity
- —
- Plain-text fallback
- -
En Dash family
The middle-length dashes – for ranges, scores and connections.
The figure dash (‒, U+2012) is the dash that measures exactly one digit. Where the en dash is half an em wide — a typographic proportion — the figure dash is one figure wide in a tabular font, which means a dash placed between digits occupies the same horizontal space as the number beside it. That is its entire purpose: in a column of figures, a figure dash keeps the columns aligned, while an en dash would shift them by a fraction of a space and break the visual rhythm of a table.
You will almost never type it, and you may never have seen one knowingly. The figure dash exists in the Unicode block alongside the em and en dashes because type specimens and legacy systems needed it, and it survives today mostly as an artefact: an older typesetting system, a database from the 1990s, a PDF exported from a tool that substituted it for a hyphen inside numbers. When it does appear in modern text, it is usually indistinguishable from an en dash on screen, which is why the two get confused constantly — and why this site’s tools match U+2012 inside the en dash family rather than leaving it to hide.
If you have found one in your text, decide what it is doing. Inside typeset tabular matter where alignment matters, the figure dash is correct and should stay. In ordinary prose, in a data file, in anything heading for a spreadsheet, database or URL, it is the wrong character: replace it with a plain hyphen so the numbers survive the trip. The en dash remover on this site treats the figure dash as an en dash and rewrites it in one click.
How to type a figure dash
Keyboard shortcuts for every platform — or skip the typing and copy the character above.
| Platform | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Windows (any app) | Alt + 8210 on the numeric keypad |
| Windows (reliable route) | charmap.exe → search U+2012 or “figure dash” |
| Mac | No shortcut — copy it above or use Emoji & Symbols (⌃⌘Space) |
| Google Docs | Insert → Special characters → search “figure dash” |
| HTML / CSS | ‒ (no named entity exists) · content: "\2012" |
| LaTeX | No standard command — \char"2012 with a font that has the glyph |
Figure Dash examples
What the character looks like doing its job — and what changes if you swap in a different dash.
Numbers stacked in a column
1‒2‒3‒4 matched the 5‒6‒7‒8 series in the table.
A phone number in typeset copy
Reception: 555‒0134
A part or account number
Model 24‒08‒1977
A date inside a table cell
03‒14‒2026 (column-aligned figures)
The four short dashes, side by side
Width is the only thing that separates them, and width is exactly what a font renders inconsistently — so compare code points, not shapes.
| Name | Glyph | Code point | Width | Job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyphen | U+002D | Fixed, narrow | Joins compound words | |
| Figure dash | U+2012 | One digit | Ranges in tabular data | |
| En dash | U+2013 | Half an em | Ranges in prose | |
| Minus sign | U+2212 | Maths figure width | Arithmetic and negatives |
Em dash vs en dash vs hyphen
Three characters that look like each other and never behave the same way. Copy the one you need, or read the full reference for each.
Questions
What is a figure dash?
Figure dash vs en dash — what is the difference?
How do I type a figure dash?
Why is there a figure dash in my text when I never typed one?
Should I replace figure dashes with hyphens?
Does this site’s en dash remover catch the figure dash?
Figure dashes in your data?
The en dash remover matches the figure dash too, so a column pasted out of a PDF comes back with plain ASCII hyphens.
Fix ranges with a hyphen