Hyphen Symbols

Hyphens are not dashes. A hyphen joins — a well-known author, a five-year plan, re-enter — while a dash separates phrases, ranges or clauses and is usually longer: the en dash – or the em dash —. Style guides disagree about which compounds need a hyphen, but the character always has the same job: it binds rather than separates.

One hyphen-like character is invisible in normal use: the soft hyphen marks a possible line break and is drawn only if the line actually breaks. It is not included in the grid below because it has no visible glyph. The non-breaking hyphen looks like an ordinary hyphen but forbids a break at that point. The specialist forms in this category — double oblique hyphen, double hyphen, oblique hyphen and dash with left upturn — are rare marks rather than everyday punctuation.

• Click a tile to copy the symbol; the “Copied!” badge confirms it is on your clipboard.
• Open a symbol’s page for its Unicode name, HTML entity, CSS and JavaScript escapes, UTF-8 bytes and keyboard routes.
• Use the dash converter when you need to replace hyphens across a whole text.
• Use the dash line generator when you want a divider or a repeated line at an exact length.

Need the wider picture? Read the hyphen vs dash guide, the em dash vs en dash guide, or how to type a dash. For sentence-level patterns, see the em dash examples.