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Last reviewed on May 7, 2026
The En Dash symbol (–) is one of the punctuation and special characters in the AllSymbols catalog. It is one of the typographic punctuation marks that fall outside the standard keyboard layout but appear constantly in well-set prose. These characters live across General Punctuation, Latin-1 Supplement, and a few other Unicode blocks.
Using the proper typographic character — smart quotes, the en dash for ranges, the em dash for asides, the real ellipsis — is the difference between text that reads as professionally set and text that reads as raw input. The keyboard substitutes (straight quotes, three periods, the hyphen-minus) are signals of unedited writing.
In Unicode, En Dash sits at code point U+2013. Web pages reference it with the HTML numeric entity –; CSS rules reference it as a quoted hex escape (the four-digit code prefixed with a backslash); in JavaScript and most modern source-code contexts you can either paste the literal character or use a Unicode escape with the same hex digits.
Most word processors substitute these automatically; on the web you usually need to insert them or rely on a typography library. Preserve them when copying between editors — some plain-text fields will silently downgrade smart quotes to straight ones.
If En Dash isn’t quite what you need, the Punctuation and Special page lists every related character on the site — including Left Double Quote and Registered. The related-symbols grid below also surfaces the closest sibling characters.