Copy the Em Dash Symbol
Click the Copy button in the editor above to copy the symbol to your clipboard.
Unicode & Technical Specifications
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Character Name | EM DASH |
| Unicode Codepoint | U+2014 |
| HTML Named Entity | — |
| HTML Decimal | — |
| HTML Hex | — |
| UTF-8 Encoding (Hex) | 0xE2 0x80 0x94 |
Why is it Called an "Em" Dash?
In traditional metal letterpress typography, an em was a unit of measurement equal to the current font's point size. In standard proportions, the capital letter M was cast on a square metal slug (e.g., 12pt high by 12pt wide). The dash cast to fill that full width became known as the em dash.
By contrast, the en dash (–) was cast to the width of the letter N (half the width of an em), and the hyphen (-) was narrower still.
Converting Em Dashes Back to Hyphens
While the em dash looks elegant in print and typography, many legacy databases, command-line interfaces, URL slugs, and SMS gateways do not support multi-byte Unicode characters. You can use our free Remove Em Dash tool to convert all instances of — into clean ASCII hyphens.
