How to Type an Em Dash, and Why Your Software Keeps Changing It

How Do You Type an Em Dash on Windows?

Hold the left Alt key, type 0151 on the numeric keypad, and release Alt. Num Lock must be on, and the digits must come from the numeric keypad rather than the number row above the letters.

Three conditions in that sentence are argued about in the source that ranks first for this method, and it is worth reporting the argument rather than hiding it. The accepted answer on the Super User thread for this question specifies the left Alt key, on the strength of a correction from a commenter. The author of that answer then replies that the right Alt works on his machine, and a third user reports that both work on his laptop. A fourth notes that the method needs a numeric keypad at all. The honest summary is that the numpad requirement is real and the left-versus-right question is hardware dependent. We did not test it; there is no Windows machine in this environment, and every keystroke on this page is reported as what its source publishes.

On Windows 10 version 1903 and later there is a second route that needs no numeric keypad, which is the next section.

How do you type an em dash without a numeric keypad?

Press Windows and the period key together, then choose the omega tab in the panel that opens and pick the em dash from the symbols. The panel can be driven with Tab and the arrow keys, so this works without touching a mouse, which is what the original question on Super User was actually asking for.

This is the most useful section on the page for most readers, because most keyboards sold today are laptop keyboards and have no numeric keypad. Google’s own People Also Ask box puts the no-numpad version of this question first, above the plain one. If the emoji panel is not available, three fallbacks work in roughly this order of reliability: in Microsoft Word, Ctrl and Alt and the minus key on the numeric keypad, or an autoformat rule; in any application, a text expansion rule that turns a string you choose into the character; and in a web form, the HTML entity —.

One contradiction is worth flagging because a reader will meet it. Directly beneath the emoji panel answer on that same thread, a comment states that the Alt and numpad combination is the only shortcut that works everywhere. Both claims are on the page, they cannot both be complete, and no article on this search mentions that the disagreement exists.

How Do You Type an Em Dash on a Mac?

Press Option and Shift and the hyphen key together. Option and the hyphen key without Shift gives you the shorter en dash instead. This is the one platform where the shortcut is a genuine two-hand chord rather than a numeric code, and it is documented the same way by Zapier and by the Meta Stack Exchange answer.

There is a second thing happening on a Mac that matters more than the shortcut. Smart dash substitution is on by default in macOS, so typing two hyphens in a row often produces the character without any shortcut being pressed at all. If you are reading this because an em dash appeared in your text and you did not put it there, that setting is the likely reason, and turning it off is covered further down.

How Do You Type an Em Dash in Word and Google Docs?

Microsoft Word gives you three routes: Ctrl and Alt and the minus key on the numeric keypad; typing 2014 and immediately pressing Alt and X; or typing two hyphens between two words with no spaces and continuing to type, which lets autoformat make the substitution for you.

Note the number in the second route. It is 2014 here and 0151 in the Windows Alt code, and both produce the same character. That is not an error in either instruction, and the reason is the subject of the next section but one.

Google Docs has no built-in keyboard shortcut for the character. It is handled either by the operating system methods above, or by adding a rule under Tools, Preferences, Substitutions, which is the same mechanism as Word’s autoformat under a different name.

How Do You Type an Em Dash on Linux and Chrome OS?

Press Ctrl and Shift and U together, release them, type 2014, then press Enter or the space bar. The Meta Stack Exchange thread is the only page in the ranking set that carries this route, although Chromebook is one of the eight related searches Google itself lists under this query.

The number here is 2014 again, the same one Word uses with Alt and X, and for the same reason: both are asking for a Unicode code point written in hexadecimal. That makes these two instructions the same instruction wearing different clothes.

Why Do the Shortcuts Give Different Numbers for the Same Character?

Because there are three different numbering systems in play, and every one of the numbers you have seen on this page is correct within its own system.

We verified this rather than repeating it, using Python 3.12.13 and the standard library’s Windows-1252 codec. Decoding the single byte 0x97 as Windows-1252 returns the em dash, and 0x97 is 151 in decimal, which is the number in Alt 0151. Looking up decimal 8212 in Unicode returns the same character, which is the number in Alt 8212. And 2014 read as hexadecimal is that same code point again, which is what Word’s Alt and X and the Linux Ctrl Shift U route both expect.

There is one practical rule to carry away from this, and it explains a failure people run into without knowing why. On Windows the leading zero is a switch. Alt 0151 and Alt 151 are not the same instruction: the zero selects the Windows-1252 table, and without it the system reads the number against an older code page and hands you a different character entirely. If a shortcut you copied from somewhere gives you the wrong symbol, check whether you dropped the zero.

What Is the Difference Between an Em Dash, an En Dash and a Hyphen?

They are three separate characters: U+2014 for the em dash, U+2013 for the en dash, and U+002D for the hyphen on your keyboard. Every method described above differs by exactly one digit between the first two, which is why they are so easily swapped by accident.

The family is larger than those three, and we counted it with the unicodedata module at Unicode version 15.0.0. Ten characters sit in the group people reach for when they say dash. Nine of them are classified as dash punctuation. The tenth, U+2212 MINUS SIGN, is not punctuation at all: Unicode files it as a mathematical symbol. A commenter on that Super User thread pointed this out in 2014, and it appears nowhere else in the ranking set for this query.

One consequence of that table is worth acting on. We ran each of these ten through Unicode normalisation, and only three fold into anything else: the non-breaking hyphen becomes a plain hyphen, the small em dash becomes an ordinary em dash, and the fullwidth hyphen-minus becomes the keyboard hyphen. The em dash itself folds to nothing under any normalisation form. It never becomes a hyphen. So a find and replace typed with a hyphen will not catch a single em dash in your document, and neither will an exact-match search. This is the same class of problem as the invisible characters that survive a copy and paste, where the character you cannot see is the one breaking the match.

How Do You Type a 2 Em Dash?

Two ways, and they are not the same thing. You can type the em dash twice, giving two characters side by side, which is what most style guides mean by a two-em dash and what most fonts will render cleanly. Unicode also defines a single character for it, U+2E3A TWO-EM DASH, with U+2E3B THREE-EM DASH beside it. We confirmed both exist and are classified as dash punctuation, and that neither folds to anything under normalisation.

For anything you do not control, the doubled character is the safer choice. Font coverage for U+2E3A is far thinner than for U+2014, and a character the font does not carry renders as a box rather than as a longer dash.

How Do You Stop Your Software Inserting Em Dashes?

Turn off the substitution rule in the application that is doing it, because in most cases nobody typed the character at all. In Microsoft Word it is under autoformat as you type, in the rule that replaces hyphens with a dash. On macOS it is in System Settings under Keyboard and Text, in the smart quotes and dashes option, and it applies system wide. In Google Docs it is under Tools, Preferences, Substitutions.

This is the half of the question that the pages ranking for it do not answer, and it is worth some numbers. When we removed every em dash from this site in August 2026 there were 1,018 of them across 128 files, and when we did the same for this blog in September there were 138 more across 24 posts. Almost none had been produced by anyone pressing a shortcut. They arrived by substitution and by paste.

The second finding from that work is the one that will save you time. A blanket replacement does not work. Swapping every em dash for a comma turned one of our own sentences into a comma splice and another into a fragment, so the sweep had to be split into four classes, decided by reading each instance: dashes introducing a label, dashes joining two clauses, dashes acting as a connector, and dashes wrapping an aside. Seventeen paired dashes became brackets, because a pair of them is a single piece of punctuation rather than two separate marks. If you want the character stripped out of a block of text rather than rewritten by hand, our em dash remover does the mechanical half and leaves the sentence surgery to you.

What This Page Does Not Claim

No keystroke described here was tested by us. There is no Windows machine and no Microsoft Word licence in this environment, so every shortcut is reported as what its named source publishes, and where those sources disagree, as they do about the Alt key and the numeric keypad, the disagreement is left visible rather than quietly resolved in favour of whichever is more convenient.

What was measured here is the encoding arithmetic, the ten-character family, and the normalisation behaviour, each with the instrument named in the sentence that uses it. Questions of usage, which is to say when an em dash is the right punctuation mark rather than a comma or a pair of brackets, are not answered on this page. Merriam-Webster ranks third for this query and publishes the authoritative answer to that question, and duplicating it here would add nothing.

How This Guide Was Built

Seven ranking results were captured live on 3 September 2026 with the country set to the United States and personalisation off, and the AI Overview was captured twice to confirm it was stable. All seven pages were extracted in full: five directly, and two through a proxy after the first tool received HTTP 403 from Cloudflare. One Reddit thread returned only 137 words behind a bot challenge and is counted as a partial extraction rather than as a source.

Keyword research was run the same day against Google’s autocomplete, 108 probes returning 409 unique queries. That source publishes no search volume and none is quoted here. Character facts were measured with Python 3.12.13 and unicodedata at Unicode version 15.0.0, and the Windows-1252 arithmetic with the standard library codec. The version matters and is named for a reason: the default Python on macOS is 3.9.6 at Unicode 13.0.0, and the two versions can disagree about characters added in between.

Sources credited by name in the text above: Merriam-Webster, Zapier, Microsoft Learn, Lenovo, Super User and Meta Stack Exchange.