About En Dash
En Dash is the Unicode character – at codepoint U+2013 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The en dash marks a span — 10–24, 1939–45, Monday–Friday — where it stands for "to" or "through". It also joins items of equal weight, as in a New York–London flight, where a hyphen would wrongly suggest one hyphenated name. Outside the United States it does a second job: British and much European practice sets a spaced en dash where American practice closes up an em dash. Unicode records none of this. The code chart gives the name and nothing else — no annotation, no cross-references — so the conventions live in house style, not in the standard. General category Pd, General Punctuation, Unicode 1.1, HTML –, and Windows-1252 0x96, which is why it survives legacy pipelines that lose rarer dashes.
Typical uses
- Numeric, date and time ranges, unspaced: pages 10–24
- Compounds of equal partners: a Bose–Einstein condensate
- Spaced, as a parenthetical dash, in British and much European style
At a glance
- U+2013, General Punctuation; Unicode 1.1; general category Pd
- Dash property; line break class HH; East Asian Width Ambiguous
- HTML: –. Windows-1252 0x96
- No annotation in the Unicode code chart
Historical Notes
Origins
The name is a measurement from metal type. An en was nominally half an em, the em being the square of the type size, and the dash cut to that width took the name. The width was never fixed across foundries, and it is not fixed in digital faces either.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, General Punctuation. NamesList.txt gives the name alone — no usage note, no cross-references — which is worth noticing next to the em dash, whose entry does carry a note about parenthetical pairs.
The eight-bit inheritance
Windows-1252 put the en dash at 0x96 and the em dash at 0x97, and that pair is why these two dashes reached ordinary text while the figure dash and plain hyphen did not: a character in the code page is a character a word processor can produce, save and mail. It is also where the classic mojibake comes from, when a Windows-1252 byte is read as UTF-8 or the reverse.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use En Dash
To use the En 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: '\2013';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2013' evaluates to –. In Python source, write '\u2013'.
The character encodes to E2 80 93 as UTF-8 bytes and 2013 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8211.
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
- It is punctuation, not an operator. For arithmetic use the minus sign in prose and U+002D in code.
- East Asian Width is Ambiguous, so its rendered width depends on context — relevant in terminals and monospaced tables.
- Windows-1252 0x96 makes it a frequent mojibake victim: a UTF-8 en dash read as Windows-1252 comes out as the three characters –, and the Windows-1252 byte 0x96 read as UTF-8 is not valid UTF-8 at all.
- Search behaviour differs from the hyphen's. Users type hyphens; if your index does not fold the two, ranges typed with an en dash will not be found.
- – is the only named entity, and it has no semicolon-less legacy form.
Comparisons
In the Wild
Two English-language news home pages, an hour apart on 4 August 2026, made the same gesture with different characters — and neither used the other's.
The Guardian's international front page carried 23 en dashes and zero em dashes, all of them spaced parentheticals: "Blushing: why we do it – and why it's good for us", and "South Korea swelters through record high temperatures – in pictures".
AP's home page carried six em dashes and zero en dashes: "This summer isn't breaking heat records — yet." The spacing is the same on both sides of the Atlantic; only the character differs.
Elsewhere the same day: Dagens Nyheter 40, Der Spiegel 29, Kathimerini 10, and English Wikipedia's "Electron" article 228 — mostly citation page ranges. The New York Times home page and NOS carried none. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
When do I use an en dash instead of a hyphen?
For a range where you could say "to", and for compounds of two equal partners. A hyphen joins parts of one word.
Spaces around it?
Not in a range. As a parenthetical dash in British style, yes — spaced on both sides.
Is it the same as a minus sign?
No. The minus sign is a mathematical operator drawn to match the plus sign; this is punctuation.
Why does it come out as –?
An encoding mismatch. Windows-1252 puts it at 0x96 and UTF-8 encodes it as three bytes; reading one as the other produces that.
What is the HTML entity?
–, or the numeric reference. There is no semicolon-less form.