How to type En Dash
To type En Dash (–), press Alt + 0150 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + - on Mac, or write – in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2013 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2013 on Linux, or 2013 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
En Dash
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2013
- Windows
- Alt + 0150
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0150 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + - | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | – | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2013 | EN DASH |
Symbols related to En Dash
Unicode's confusables table, the one registrars use against spoofed domains, lists ‐ and ‒ as close enough to be mistaken for it, and the rest are filed under dash in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other punctuation symbols
– lives in the General Punctuation block (U+2000-U+206F), dashes, quotation marks, spaces and reference marks used across languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Pd, a dash. Every hyphen and dash variant shares this category.
What En Dash is used for
– belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it --, a text command, and there is no maths command for it at all: it is a sign that gets written down, not an operator that acts on anything. Putting it inside $...$ is how it comes out looking wrong.
What – gets confused with
– has lookalikes that are a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.
- (U+002D) is the hyphen, which joins words. The en dash spans ranges: 1914–1918.
— (U+2014) is the em dash, longer again, which separates clauses.
How En Dash behaves in software
– is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write En Dash
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2013 |
| Decimal | 8211 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 80 93 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 20 13 |
| HTML entity | – |
| HTML numeric | – or – |
| CSS | \2013 |
| JavaScript | \u2013 |
| Python | \u2013 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%80%93 |
| LaTeX, in prose | -- |
| SVG | 2013.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If – arrives as –
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 80 93 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly –. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+2013, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.