Not every language bullets its lists with a dot. German has a whole word for the dash that opens a list item — Spiegelstrich, literally mirror-stroke — and French sets lists with a tiret where English publishing reaches for a round bullet. This character is Unicode's provision for that habit: a list marker that happens to be dash-shaped, rather than a dash pressed into marking lists. Set beside the dots and circles that usually do this work, it is the one that encodes a national typesetting habit rather than a shape preference.
The distinction it protects is semantic, not visual. A hyphen joins words, and software acts on that assumption: hyphenation, line breaking, search normalisation and spell-checking all treat it as part of a word. A hyphen bullet carries none of that baggage. Tellingly, the standard's only cross-reference for it points at hyphen-minus, which is exactly the character it exists in order not to be.
It has been in the standard since Unicode 1.1 in 1993 and even has its own named HTML entity, ⁃, which is more than most of General Punctuation can claim. It remains uncommon enough to be worth a rendering check before you build anything on it — confirm your font actually draws it rather than falling back. And uncommon enough that any dash-led list you meet in the wild is almost certainly a plain ASCII hyphen doing the job by eye.
About Hyphen Bullet
Hyphen Bullet is the Unicode character ⁃ at codepoint U+2043 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Hyphen Bullet
To use the Hyphen Bullet 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: '\2043';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2043' evaluates to ⁃. In Python source, write '\u2043'.
The character encodes to E2 81 83 as UTF-8 bytes and 2043 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8259.
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.