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Copy & paste · Character reference

The hyphen (-): copy it, type it, and spot its look-alikes

One click to copy the keyboard hyphen, plus the three invisible variants that look identical on screen and break things quietly.

Or select it by hand

Click the box to select the character, then press Ctrl + C (⌘ + C on Mac).

Character
Hyphen-minus
Unicode
U+002D
HTML entity
—
Plain-text fallback
-

Four characters that look like a hyphen

Only the first is ASCII. The other three arrive from word processors and PDFs, look identical, and fail in different ways.

Copy page per character:Hyphen-minusUnicode HyphenNon-breaking HyphenSoft Hyphen

The hyphen (-, Unicode U+002D) is the shortest dash and the only one that is plain ASCII. Its job is to join: it glues compound words together (well-known, mother-in-law, six-person), keeps names readable (Jean-Pierre) and separates the groups of digits in a phone number (555-0134). Unlike the em dash and the en dash, it is not a punctuation mark in any style guide — it is a spelling device, which is why style guides argue about when a compound should be hyphenated, closed up or left open.

What makes the hyphen worth its own copy page is not the character on your keyboard but the four characters that look exactly like it. The Unicode hyphen (‐, U+2010) is what a typographer means by “hyphen”, and word processors and PDFs substitute it silently. The non-breaking hyphen (‑, U+2011) stops a line break inside a phone number or a part number. The figure dash (‒, U+2012) is one digit wide. And the soft hyphen (U+00AD) is invisible until a line break calls for it — which is why text copied out of a PDF can contain characters you cannot see, cannot search for, and cannot delete with find-and-replace, yet which break a username validator or fragment a search index.

The cards above hold all four, so you can copy whichever one you actually need — or check which one you have. If your problem is the opposite one, because a text is full of hyphens that should not be there, the hyphen remover turns each one into a space (“well-known” becomes “well known”) and the remove-all-dashes tool deletes them outright for a fully ASCII result.

How to type a hyphen-minus

Keyboard shortcuts for every platform — or skip the typing and copy the character above.

PlatformShortcut
Windows, Mac, LinuxThe key to the left of the = or 0, unshifted
iPhone / AndroidThe key between 0 and backspace — long-press for other dashes
Windows (Unicode hyphen)Alt + 8208 (U+2010)
Mac (Unicode hyphen)No shortcut — copy it from the card above
Word / Docs (optional hyphen)Ctrl + - inserts a soft hyphen for a manual line break
Word / Docs (non-breaking)Ctrl + Shift + - inserts a non-breaking hyphen
HTML / CSS­ for a soft hyphen · ‑ for a non-breaking hyphen
LaTeX- hyphen, -- en dash, --- em dash

Hyphen-minus examples

What the character looks like doing its job — and what changes if you swap in a different dash.

A compound adjective

a well-known, cost-effective, six-person team

A name

Jean-Pierre Dubois, Mary-Kate Olsen

A phone number

555-0134, +1-202-555-0134

A negative or a range in data

-12%, 2018-2022, SKU-4471

A word broken across lines

exam-ple, where the hyphen arrived from the line break, not from the writer

A prefixed word

re-elect, co-operate, anti-inflammatory

Hyphen, en dash or em dash? A three-question test

Most dash mistakes are a hyphen doing a job that belongs to a longer dash, or the reverse. These three questions settle it.

  1. 1. Does it join two words into one idea?

    Then it is a hyphen: well-known, mother-in-law, six-person. No spaces around it, no exceptions.

  2. 2. Could you read it aloud as “to” or “through”?

    Then it is an en dash: 2018–2022, pages 44–48, 10–15 minutes. In data, use a hyphen instead — same meaning, no encoding risk.

  3. 3. Does the sentence pause for an aside?

    Then it is an em dash — and if your style guide forbids the dash, a pair of commas or parentheses does the same work more quietly.

Never sure which character you are looking at? Copy the suspect into the tool on this site and the counters tell you what it was: theem dash removerandhyphen removereach report how many of their own family they found before anything changes.

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.

Em DashSeparates: asides, interruptions, breaks in thoughtEn DashRanges: 2018–2022, pages 44–48Hyphen-minusyou are hereJoins: well-known, mother-in-law

Questions

What is a hyphen?
The hyphen (-, Unicode U+002D) is the short horizontal mark on the keyboard, used to join compound words, names and number groups: well-known, Jean-Pierre, 555-0134. It is the only dash-like character in plain ASCII.
How do I copy the hyphen?
Click the big card at the top of this page. The keyboard hyphen is almost always available on your keyboard anyway — the real reason to use the copy buttons here is the three look-alikes: the Unicode hyphen, the non-breaking hyphen and the invisible soft hyphen.
Is a hyphen the same as a minus sign?
No. The hyphen (-, U+002D) is a spelling device, and screen readers may announce it as such. The true minus sign (−, U+2212) is the mathematical character, aligned with the plus sign and correctly spaced in equations. For anything mathematical, the minus sign is the correct glyph; for a plain-text field, the hyphen is the safe one.
Why does my text contain hyphens I cannot see or find?
Almost always because it was copied from a PDF or a word processor, which leaves soft hyphens (U+00AD) and non-breaking hyphens (U+2011) behind. Both are invisible or nearly invisible and cannot be typed into a find-and-replace box — but pasting the text into the hyphen remover catches them, because it matches characters by code point.
When should a compound word be hyphenated?
Before a noun, keep the hyphen: a well-known author. After the noun, most style guides drop it: the author is well known. Closed compounds — email, website, online — are set solid and no longer hyphenated. When in doubt, follow the dictionary your publication uses.
How do I remove hyphens from text?
Paste the text into the hyphen remover and press one button: every hyphen becomes a space, so “state-of-the-art” comes back as “state of the art”. For identifiers, hashtags or keys where spaces are forbidden, use the remove-all-dashes tool, which deletes the hyphens instead.
What is a non-breaking hyphen for?
It stops a word processor from breaking a line at that dash. Phone numbers, part numbers, model codes and hyphenated names are the usual cases — “555-0134” split across two lines is a courtesy number that becomes two wrong numbers. Insert it in Word with Ctrl + Shift + hyphen.

Got too many hyphens?

Paste the text, press one button, and compound words open up into separate words. Free, private and instant.

Remove hyphens instead