About Hyphen
Hyphen is the Unicode character ‐ at codepoint U+2010 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The unambiguous hyphen. The key on your keyboard sends U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, which stands in for hyphen, minus and sometimes a dash; this character stands only for a hyphen, and Unicode gives it both the Dash and Hyphen properties to say so. It is general category Pd in General Punctuation, present since Unicode 1.1. Two things follow from being unambiguous. Unicode 17's line-break data files it as HH, Unambiguous Hyphen — a class introduced for exactly this problem, where U+002D has to be disambiguated from context. And HTML names it twice: ‐ and ‐ are both this character. It is not in Windows-1252, which is a large part of why it never reached ordinary text.
Typical uses
- Typesetting systems that need a hyphen a line-breaker will never mistake for a minus
- Character data and documentation where the distinction from U+002D is the point
- Nothing much else — see In the Wild
At a glance
- U+2010, General Punctuation; Unicode 1.1; general category Pd
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class HH (Unambiguous Hyphen)
- Properties: Dash and Hyphen — figure dash has only the first
- HTML: ‐ or ‐. No Windows-1252 slot
Historical Notes
Origins
The hyphen is older than the machines that mangled it. What is specific to this codepoint is the split: mechanical typewriters had one short horizontal key and ASCII inherited it, so the character that carries the hyphen's meaning in Unicode was encoded separately from the character everybody actually presses.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, in the original General Punctuation block. The standard's cross-references point at U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS and U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN and stop there — no annotation argues for it, and none warns against it.
The line-break class is new
Unicode 17.0's LineBreak.txt gives this character class HH, Unambiguous Hyphen. That class exists because U+002D might be a minus sign, so a line breaker has to inspect its surroundings before allowing a break; this character needs no such inspection. Older references describe it under the previous classification, so a table found online may disagree with the current data file.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Hyphen
To use the Hyphen 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: '\2010';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2010' evaluates to ‐. In Python source, write '\u2010'.
The character encodes to E2 80 90 as UTF-8 bytes and 2010 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8208.
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
- Do not use it in code. Programming languages, spreadsheet formulas and command lines parse U+002D; this character is not a substitute anywhere a machine is doing the reading.
- A search for the ASCII hyphen will not match it. The two are visually close and are distinct strings to any database that has not been told otherwise.
- It has no Windows-1252 slot, so it cannot survive a round trip through a legacy eight-bit pipeline the way an en dash or em dash can.
- East Asian Width is Ambiguous, so rendered width depends on context — a consideration in terminals and monospaced tables, not in body copy.
- Both ‐ and ‐ produce it. The duplication is in the HTML entity table itself, not a mistake in any one document.
Comparisons
‐−
Minus sign vs hyphen
The key on your keyboard is neither of them. When a hyphen and a real minus sign are genuinely different characters — and why the correct one in prose is the wrong one to put in code.
‐–—
Em dash vs en dash vs hyphen
Three strokes, three jobs: the em dash interrupts a sentence, the en dash spans a range, the hyphen binds two words. Here is when to reach for each — and why the key on your keyboard is none of them.
In the Wild
Sixteen live pages on 4 August 2026 — the home pages of the Guardian, BBC News, AP, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Dagens Nyheter, NOS, Kathimerini and Protothema, plus MDN's CSS hyphens page, practicaltypography.com's dashes chapter, unicode.org's own Unicode 17.0.0 page, a Norwegian weather forecast, and two long Wikipedia articles — contained this character not once between them.
The two pages that did carry it were both articles about dashes: English Wikipedia's "Dash" (8 occurrences) and Russian Wikipedia's "Тире" (13). In other words, every sighting is a specimen.
The near-miss is worth recording. practicaltypography.com's chapter on hyphens and dashes uses U+2011, the non-breaking hyphen, once, and 207 soft hyphens — a page as fussy about hyphenation as any on the web, and it still reaches for U+002D everywhere else. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is this the hyphen on my keyboard?
No. Your keyboard sends U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS. This is a separate character that means hyphen and nothing else.
Should I use it instead?
Only where the distinction is the point. In ordinary text nothing is gained, search will not match it, and code will reject it.
Why does HTML give it two names?
‐ and ‐ both resolve to U+2010 in the WHATWG entity table. Duplicate names are common there — several hundred characters carry more than one — and there is no difference between them.
What is line-break class HH?
Unambiguous Hyphen, in Unicode 17.0's line-break data. It marks hyphens a line breaker can break after without checking whether they might be a minus sign.
Does the figure dash do the same job?
No. That one is a width, this one is a meaning. The figure dash carries the Dash property but not Hyphen.