# How is a hyphen-minus different from a mathematical minus?

A mathematical operator, distinct from the ASCII hyphen-minus. Code points: U+2212. Source-code parsers may require ASCII - for subtraction. A non-equivalent fallback is "-" (ASCII hyphen-minus). Different typographic meaning and width. 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+2212 MINUS SIGN

## What was checked

### Mathematical minus sign

A mathematical operator, distinct from the ASCII hyphen-minus.

Source-code parsers may require ASCII - for subtraction.

Use U+002D for programming-language minus operators when the syntax 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/hyphen-minus-versus-mathematical-minus.json
Exact lookup: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/exact/2212.json
HTML: https://copypastecharacters.com/answers/hyphen-minus-versus-mathematical-minus/

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