About Em Dash
Em Dash is the Unicode character — at codepoint U+2014 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The widest ordinary dash, and the one English writers get attached to — it opens a sentence up for an aside, marks an abrupt turn, or lands a final clause harder than a comma would. Unicode's code chart carries a rare piece of style advice for it: "may be used in pairs to offset parenthetical text". It also cross-references the two-em dash and the katakana-hiragana prolonged sound mark, a lookalike that is not a dash at all. Its line-break class is B2 — a break opportunity on both sides, which in the whole of Unicode only two other characters share: the two-em dash and the three-em dash. American practice closes it up against the words; British and much European practice uses a spaced en dash instead. It is Windows-1252 0x97, which is why it survives legacy pipelines.
Typical uses
- Parenthetical asides, in pairs — like this — in American style
- An abrupt break or a final clause given extra weight
- Dialogue in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian, where it replaces quotation marks entirely
At a glance
- U+2014, General Punctuation; Unicode 1.1; general category Pd
- Line break class B2 — break opportunity before and after
- Chart note: "may be used in pairs to offset parenthetical text"
- HTML: —. Windows-1252 0x97
Historical Notes
Origins
The em is the square of the type size, and the dash cut to that measure took its name. The relationship is nominal in digital faces: an em dash is drawn to look like one em, not measured against one.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, General Punctuation. Its entry carries a usage note — "may be used in pairs to offset parenthetical text" — plus cross-references to U+2E3A TWO-EM DASH and U+30FC, the katakana-hiragana prolonged sound mark. The second is a warning about shape, not meaning: in Japanese text U+30FC lengthens a vowel and is not punctuation.
The dialogue tradition
Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian and Romanian mark dialogue with a dash rather than quotation marks. Unicode named a separate character for that job — the horizontal bar — and the tradition did not follow it. What those languages set is this character.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Em Dash
To use the Em Dash symbol (—) in HTML, insert the
entity — directly into your markup. The decimal entity — works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2014';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2014' evaluates to —. In Python source, write '\u2014'.
The character encodes to E2 80 94 as UTF-8 bytes and 2014 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8212.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- Line break class B2 allows a break before *and* after. If you need the dash to stay attached to what precedes it, that is a CSS or markup problem, not a character choice.
- Windows-1252 0x97 makes it a standard mojibake victim: a UTF-8 em dash read as Windows-1252 comes out as —.
- Word processors convert a double hyphen to this character automatically. Text that has passed through one and text that has not are different strings, which matters to any exact-match search.
- The cross-referenced U+30FC is visually similar in some fonts and semantically unrelated. Do not substitute either for the other in Japanese text.
- — is the named entity; there is no semicolon-less legacy form.
Comparisons
In the Wild
Project Gutenberg's Spanish text of Don Quijote, read on 4 August 2026, contains 6,925 em dashes in 2.17 million characters — and zero occurrences of the horizontal bar, the character Unicode actually named "quotation dash". The dashes are dialogue markers, the Spanish raya. The same text carries 57 « and 290 » and only 11 pairs of curly double quotes.
English-language news split cleanly on the same day. AP's home page used the em dash six times, spaced: "This summer isn't breaking heat records — yet." The Guardian's international front page used it zero times, reaching for a spaced en dash instead — 23 of them.
Der Spiegel used it twice; the New York Times home page, Le Monde, Dagens Nyheter and NOS not at all. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Spaces around an em dash?
American style closes it up; British and much European style uses a spaced en dash for the same job. Pick one and hold to it.
Is the double hyphen the same thing?
No. It is a typewriter substitute. Word processors usually convert it, which is why some pasted text has real em dashes and some still has "--".
Why does it come out as —?
An encoding mismatch — Windows-1252 has it at 0x97 while UTF-8 uses three bytes, so reading one as the other yields —.
What is U+30FC doing in its cross-references?
It is the katakana-hiragana prolonged sound mark, a Japanese vowel-lengthening character that looks similar and means something entirely different.
Which dash marks Spanish dialogue?
This one. The character named "quotation dash" is the horizontal bar, and Spanish typography does not use it.