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Remove hyphen: open, swap or count every -

A hyphen joins things. Remove the join, swap it for a space, underscore or nothing, or count the family — including the invisible Unicode hyphens a PDF hands you.

Dash remover tool

Everything happens in your browser. Your text never leaves this page.

This tool matches
Replace each dash with

Each hyphen becomes a space: well-known opens into well known.

Press Ctrl (or ⌘) + Enter to run it again.

Text with spaces instead

0dashes removed

Hyphens look harmless — they are the shortest, oldest and most compatible dash — which is exactly why they survive unnoticed until something downstream chokes. A name like “Jean-Pierre” breaks a username validator, “well-known” fails a keyword search that indexes the plain word, phone numbers formatted 555-0134 split a column in Excel, and text copied from a PDF arrives with soft hyphens and line-break hyphens that were never part of the words. The Remove tab opens each compound into readable words: “well-known” becomes “well known”, “state-of-the-art” becomes “state of the art”.

The Replace tab is for the destinations that want something other than a space. An underscore keeps the words as one token machines accept — “well_known” for filenames and column headers. Nothing fuses them — “wellknown” for slugs, hashtags and keys. A comma turns a list separator back into punctuation. What you want depends entirely on where the text is going, and this page applies one rule to the whole text in a single pass.

Count first when you are not sure what you are dealing with. The engine matches four hyphens, not one: the keyboard hyphen (U+002D), the Unicode hyphen (U+2010) that PDFs hand you, the non-breaking hyphen (U+2011) that holds a phone number together, and the invisible soft hyphen (U+00AD). They look identical on screen and a find-and-replace for “-” catches only the first. The Count tab reports each one separately, because a cleaned hyphen with a soft hyphen left beside it still fails an ASCII check later.

Remove hyphens

Deletion is the classic job here, and the only one with a real trap: deleting a hyphen inside a word fuses it. The walkthroughs cover the safe paths.

Remove hyphens from words, names and text

Compound words are where hyphens multiply fastest: well-known, state-of-the-art, cost-effective, twenty-year-old. To remove hyphens from text and keep the words readable, paste it into the Remove tab — “state-of-the-art” becomes “state of the art” in one pass. When you are cleaning identifiers, slugs or hashtags where spaces are forbidden, use Nothing as the replacement instead: it deletes each hyphen so the words fuse as if it had never been typed. Names deserve a caution: “Jean-Pierre” and “Spencer Tracy” are both correct, so run a name list through the tool only when you know which convention your target system expects.

Unicode hyphens and the invisible look-alikes

Not every hyphen is the hyphen you think it is. Copying from PDFs, Word or websites can introduce the Unicode hyphen (‐, U+2010), the non-breaking hyphen (‑, U+2011) and even the figure dash (‒, U+2012) — all visually indistinguishable from ASCII’s hyphen-minus (-, U+002D) in most fonts, and all foreign to systems that expect plain ASCII. A find-and-replace for “-” misses them completely, because you cannot type the invisible character into the search box. The tool matches every variant by code point, which is why pasted text always comes back fully clean.

Hyphen remover vs dash remover — which do you need?

If the problem is compound words, phone numbers or identifiers, this page is the right one. If the problem is the long dash in prose or AI-written text, use the em dash tool; for ranges like 2018–2022, the en dash tool. The all-in-one dash remover handles all three families, so a mixed document (prose with em dashes, tables with en dashes, compounds with hyphens) can be cleaned in a single pass with one shared replacement rule — but for a text where hyphens are the only problem, this page is one click and done.

Practical uses

Cleaning copy-pasted PDF text where line-break hyphens fragment words is the classic case — the remover deletes the hyphen while repairing the spacing left behind. SEO teams strip hyphens from titles to compare against search queries. Data teams normalise product codes before import. Writers merge compounds to satisfy a style guide that prefers open compounds (“email” rather than “e-mail”). And anyone who has ever tried to type a hyphenated name into a form that rejects it knows the value of a one-click strip.

Replace hyphens: what to put in the join

Five answers, each with the job it is right for. The replacement applies to the whole paste in one pass.

Blank space

Prose, search and readability

The default for text a person will read: compound words become two words, which is what most plain-language and SEO rewrites are doing when they say “remove the hyphens”.

a well-known author

a well known author

A hyphenated name becomes two words, which may not be what its owner wants.

Underscore

Filenames and column headers

Keeps the words together as one token while remaining readable: report_final_v2, first_name, order_id. The convention every scripting language and spreadsheet expects.

report-final-v2.csv

report_final_v2.csv

Not valid in a URL path — use the hyphen there, which is the one case where the hyphen was already right.

Nothing

Slugs, hashtags and keys

Fuses the halves into a single word: wellknown, motherinlaw, 5550134. Use it when the value is an identifier rather than a phrase.

#well-known-tips

#wellknowntips

Doubled letters can result — “re-read” becomes “reread”, which is correct, but “co-operate” becomes “cooperate”.

Comma

Retyped lists and tags

When the hyphens are being used as list separators — ingredients, tags, keywords — a comma is the punctuation the list actually wanted.

salt-pepper-paprika

salt, pepper, paprika

Only correct if the text really was a list. It will also comma-join genuine compounds.

Custom

Anything else

Type any replacement in the box: a middle dot for a byline, a slash for a path, a full stop, or a word such as “and”.

Hendrix-Clapton

Hendrix and Clapton

A word replacement gets its own spaces, so the sentence still reads naturally.

When the hyphen is right and should stay

Do not “fix” correct hyphenation in the name of sounding human. Keep the hyphen when the compound comes before a noun (“a twenty-year-old building”), when the words would otherwise be misread (re-cover and recover, co-op and coop), for compound numbers (twenty-one, forty-five), and when a prefix ends in a vowel that would collide (co-owner) or attaches to a capital or a number (pre-2000). What you should cut is the pile-up, not the hyphen: two hyphenated modifiers in a sentence is ordinary, four in a row is a list of adjectives standing where evidence should be.

Four hyphens, one of them on your keyboard

Hyphen

U+002D

The keyboard character. ASCII, universal, and the one a spreadsheet or a shell command expects.

Unicode Hyphen

U+2010

A typographic hyphen with the same glyph. Common in text copied out of PDFs and the usual reason a script that expects ASCII fails.

Non-Breaking Hyphen

U+2011

Keeps a number or name from splitting across lines. Identical on screen, a different string to a lookup.

Soft Hyphen

U+00AD

Invisible until a word breaks, and it is matched here too — a cleaned hyphen with a soft hyphen left beside it still fails an ASCII check.

From the blog

Hyphens are the quiet half of the AI-tells story. The evidence:

Does ChatGPT Use Too Many Hyphens?

Correct hyphens at model density — which to keep, which to cut.

Signs of AI Writing

The complete tell list, ranked by measured signal strength.

Is My Writing AI?

A pattern census, not a detector: counts you can act on, locally.

Other dash cleanups

Em Dash Tool

Remove, replace or count the long dash — and the look-alikes that hide beside it.

En Dash Tool

Ranges like 2018–2022: remove, replace with “to”, or count the en dash family.

Replace All Dashes

One rule for em dashes, en dashes and hyphens at once.

Non-Breaking Hyphen Remover

Turn U+2011 into a plain hyphen so lookups match again.

Soft Hyphen Remover

Delete the invisible U+00AD characters PDFs leave behind.

Hyphen (copy page)

Copy the hyphen and its invisible look-alikes, with typing shortcuts.

Questions

What does the Remove tab do?
It finds every hyphen in your text — the ordinary keyboard hyphen, the Unicode hyphen, the non-breaking hyphen and the invisible soft hyphen — and opens each one into a space, so compound words become separate words. It works on unlimited text entirely inside your browser, with nothing to configure.
Will “well-known” become “wellknown” or “well known”?
The Remove tab opens the words: “well-known” becomes “well known”, which is what prose, names and titles want. If your destination forbids spaces — identifiers, hashtags, database keys — use the Replace tab with Nothing, which deletes the hyphen so the words fuse into “wellknown”.
How do I replace hyphens with underscores?
Open the Replace tab and choose Underscore. That is the usual fix for filenames and column headers, where a hyphen can be read as a minus sign by a spreadsheet formula or a shell command, while the underscore is always safe.
What does the Count tab report?
The total hyphen count, per family member and per 1,000 words. The breakdown matters more than the total here: a high soft-hyphen count means the text came out of a PDF or a web scraper, and those invisible characters break search and sorting even when they never render.
How do I remove hyphens in Word or Google Docs?
Word: Ctrl+H, search for - (or ^~ for an optional hyphen), replace with a space or nothing, then Replace All. Google Docs: Edit → Find and replace, same idea. Those dialogs cannot match the invisible Unicode hyphens, which is where this tool helps.
Does it replace en dashes and em dashes too?
No, and that is deliberate. An en dash marks a range and an em dash marks an aside, so swapping them for spaces would change the meaning of the sentence. This page touches only the hyphen family; the replace all dashes page is the one-rule-for-everything version.

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