The ultimate em dash tool.

What is an em dash?

The em dash (—) is the longest of the three main dashes used in English typography. Named after the typographic unit of measurement equal to the width of the capital letter "M," it has been a staple of print and editorial design for centuries. Today it appears in novels, newspapers, Slack messages, and social posts — wherever a writer wants more emphasis than a comma but less formality than parentheses.

Em dash vs en dash vs hyphen

The three dashes look similar but serve very different purposes:

• —Em dash — marks a dramatic pause, sets off a parenthetical phrase, or signals an abrupt interruption. "She opened the door—and stopped dead in her tracks."
• –En dash — indicates ranges or connections between things. "Pages 10–20," "the London–Paris train."
• -Hyphen — joins compound words or splits a word at a line break. "Well-known," "self-aware."

Em dash HTML entity & Unicode reference

Developers working in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript will encounter the em dash in several forms. The Unicode code point is U+2014. In HTML you can write it as the named entity —, the decimal reference —, or the hex reference —. In JavaScript strings use the escaped form \u2014. All modern browsers and operating systems support it natively.

The em dash in other writing systems

Different languages handle the long dash differently. In Arabic publishing, the em dash appears much as in English; the tatweel (ـ) on this page is a separate character used for letter stretching in Arabic script. Japanese uses the dash (ダッシュ, —) and the double em dash (⸺) for pauses in dialogue. Korean writing uses the em dash to set off explanatory clauses similarly to English. Greek traditionally uses the em dash in dialogue to mark a speaker change, placed at the start of a line. This site provides the standard Unicode em dash (U+2014) used across all these contexts.

A brief history of the em dash

The em dash has its roots in the early days of movable type. In the Gutenberg era, printers used long dashes to fill space and indicate a missing or unknown word — a convention that persists in scholarly citations today (———). By the 18th and 19th centuries, novelists and journalists had adopted it as a rhetorical tool, using it for dramatic effect. Emily Dickinson famously used it as her primary punctuation mark, defying conventions entirely. In the digital age, the em dash was encoded as Unicode U+2014 and has appeared in every major character set since. Today, the AP Stylebook, Chicago Manual of Style, and MLA all have specific guidance on its use — confirming its place as one of the most discussed marks in modern writing.