About Horizontal Bar Quotation Dash
Horizontal Bar Quotation Dash is the Unicode character ― at codepoint U+2015 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
A character with a clearly stated purpose and almost no evidence of anyone acting on it. Unicode's code chart gives it the alias "quotation dash" and the note "long dash introducing quoted text" — and the languages that mark dialogue with a dash set the em dash or the en dash instead. Two properties set it apart. Its line-break class is AI, Ambiguous — the only dash-punctuation character in Unicode with that class: a line breaker resolves it as ideographic in an East Asian context and as ordinary punctuation elsewhere. And Unicode specifies no length for it, so its width is whatever the font decides. General category Pd, Unicode 1.1, HTML ―, no Windows-1252 slot.
Typical uses
- Legacy round-trips from Greek and other eight-bit encodings that carried a horizontal bar
- Occasionally as a rule or divider, on the strength of the name rather than any convention
- The dialogue role it was named for, in practice, belongs to the em dash
At a glance
- U+2015, General Punctuation; Unicode 1.1; general category Pd
- Line break class AI (Ambiguous) — the only dash in Unicode with it
- Chart alias "quotation dash"; note: "long dash introducing quoted text"
- HTML: ―. No Windows-1252 slot. No specified length
Historical Notes
Origins
Its reason for existing is round-trip compatibility with earlier encodings that carried a horizontal bar as a distinct character from the em dash. Unicode encoded it so those documents could convert without loss, and gave it a descriptive alias on the way past.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1. The formal alias "quotation dash" and the note "long dash introducing quoted text" are both in NamesList.txt today. The dialogue convention they describe is real in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian and Romanian — what is not established is that this character is what any of them sets.
No length
Unicode does not specify how long this dash should be. That is unusual: the em dash and en dash carry names that are themselves measurements, and the three-em dash says its width outright. A character whose name is about function and whose shape is undefined is difficult to use deliberately.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Horizontal Bar Quotation Dash
To use the Horizontal Bar Quotation 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: '\2015';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2015' evaluates to ―. In Python source, write '\u2015'.
The character encodes to E2 80 95 as UTF-8 bytes and 2015 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8213.
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 AI means "ambiguous": the resolution depends on the surrounding context being treated as East Asian or not. Where that matters, the tailoring decides, not the character.
- Unicode specifies no width. Do not rely on it rendering longer than an em dash, or at any particular length.
- No Windows-1252 slot, so it will not round-trip through a legacy eight-bit pipeline.
- ― is its named entity, an abbreviation of "horizontal bar" rather than of the quotation-dash alias.
- If the goal is dialogue in a Romance or Slavic language, use the em dash. That is what the observed practice sets.
In the Wild
Four texts that should show this character if anything does, read on 4 August 2026, contained not one occurrence between them.
Project Gutenberg's Spanish Don Quijote — 2.17 million characters, 6,925 em dashes marking dialogue, zero of this character. Kathimerini and Protothema, two Greek news home pages, carried zero; Protothema marks quotation with 36 pairs of guillemets instead. Greek Wikipedia's article on Paula carried zero.
Twelve further pages the same day — the Guardian, BBC News, AP, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Dagens Nyheter, NOS, MDN, practicaltypography.com, unicode.org and a weather forecast — also carried none.
The character does appear on Russian Wikipedia's article about dashes, nine times, where it is the subject. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is this the dash Spanish uses for dialogue?
The evidence says no. Spanish dialogue is set with the em dash; this character's dialogue role is in its Unicode annotation rather than in observed practice.
How long is it?
Unicode does not say. Its width is a font decision.
Why does it exist?
Round-trip compatibility with earlier encodings that carried a horizontal bar separate from the em dash.
What is line-break class AI?
Ambiguous — the line breaker resolves it as ideographic or not depending on how the surrounding context is tailored.
What is the HTML entity?
―, from "horizontal bar".