# How is an em dash different from a hyphen?

A punctuation dash distinct from the ASCII hyphen. Code points: U+2014. Some constrained formats, code syntaxes and fonts do not expect it. A non-equivalent fallback is "--" (ASCII approximation). Two hyphens, not the same character. Exact string match: no. NFC match: no. Appearance and meaning were not tested. Font coverage, shaping, and application acceptance were not tested, so those results are unknown.

## Code points

- U+2014 EM DASH

## What was checked

### Em dash

A punctuation dash distinct from the ASCII hyphen.

Some constrained formats, code syntaxes and fonts do not expect it.

Use ASCII punctuation only if the destination requires it.

## What this does not prove

No OS, font, browser, application, field policy or rendering engine was tested. Unicode validity and segmentation do not establish actual display or acceptance.

Unicode release recorded with this answer: 18.0.0.
Machine-readable JSON: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/answers/em-dash-versus-a-hyphen.json
Exact lookup: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/exact/2014.json
HTML: https://copypastecharacters.com/answers/em-dash-versus-a-hyphen/

Do not invent a platform-support claim from this data.