About Three-em Dash
Three-em Dash is the Unicode character ⸻ at codepoint U+2E3B in the Supplemental Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
Three ems end to end — long enough that it reads as a rule rather than as punctuation. Its bibliographic use, standing in for a repeated author name, is documented by style manuals rather than by Unicode: the code chart gives the name and no annotation at all. It arrived late — Unicode 6.1, in Supplemental Punctuation rather than General Punctuation, which is where the older dashes live. Lateness has consequences. There is no named HTML entity and no Windows-1252 slot, and font coverage is the weak point: where the glyph is missing the result is a replacement box rather than a fallback, so the faces you ship are worth testing rather than assuming. Line-break class B2, like the em dash.
Typical uses
- Bibliography entries repeating the previous entry's author
- Occasionally as a rule in tabular matter, on the strength of its length
At a glance
- U+2E3B, Supplemental Punctuation; Unicode 6.1; general category Pd
- Added in Unicode 6.1, where the General Punctuation dashes date from 1.1
- No annotation in the Unicode code chart; no named HTML entity
- Line break class B2; no Windows-1252 slot
Historical Notes
Origins
The convention is older than the codepoint by a century or more: repeating an author's name down a column of a bibliography cost type and space, and a long rule said "same as above". Style manuals still describe it.
Unicode
Unicode 6.1 added it to Supplemental Punctuation together with U+2E3A TWO-EM DASH. The em dash cross-references the two-em dash; nothing cross-references this one, and NamesList.txt gives it a bare name.
The asymmetry with its sibling
The two-em dash carries a formal Unicode alias — omission dash — naming the job it does. The three-em dash has no alias and no note. Unicode encoded a length and left the meaning to the manuals, which is a fair description of how the character behaves in practice.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Three-em Dash
To use the Three-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: '\2E3B';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2E3B' evaluates to ⸻. In Python source, write '\u2E3B'.
The character encodes to E2 B8 BB as UTF-8 bytes and 2E3B as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 11835.
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
- Font coverage is the thing to check first. A missing glyph here shows as a replacement box rather than falling back to something similar, so test the faces you actually ship rather than assuming coverage.
- No named HTML entity and no Windows-1252 slot. Numeric reference or the literal character, in a UTF-8 document.
- Three consecutive em dashes are what most documents that look like they use it are really using. That renders everywhere and is not the same string.
- Line break class B2 permits a break before and after — worth knowing if it is standing in as a rule in tabular matter.
- Added in Unicode 6.1, so anything built against an older character database may not know it at all.
In the Wild
Sixteen live pages on 4 August 2026 contained this character not once between them: the home pages of the Guardian, BBC News, AP, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Dagens Nyheter, NOS, Kathimerini and Protothema, MDN's CSS hyphens page, practicaltypography.com's dashes chapter, unicode.org's Unicode 17.0.0 page, a Norwegian weather forecast, and English Wikipedia's articles on the electron and on absolute zero.
Two pages carried it, and both are about dashes: English Wikipedia's "Dash" (once) and Russian Wikipedia's "Тире" (five times). The English article also carries five two-em dashes, so the pair appears together where they are being catalogued rather than used.
The character's real home is a bibliography, and a bibliography is not a web page anybody links to. Read this as evidence about the general web rather than about scholarly reference lists. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
What is it for?
Standing in for a repeated author name in a bibliography. Style manuals document the convention; Unicode does not annotate the character.
Can I just type three em dashes?
Most documents that appear to use it do exactly that. It renders everywhere, and it is a different string from the real character.
Why does it show as a box?
Because the font in front of the reader has no glyph for it. It was added late, in Unicode 6.1, and coverage is worth checking in the faces you actually ship.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Use the numeric reference.
How is it different from the two-em dash?
Length, and purpose. The two-em dash has a formal Unicode alias — omission dash — for redacting a word or name. This one has no alias at all.