this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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What's this?
An em dash is
--, two dashes. It's a way to break up a sentence -- sort of like a comma.Apparently AI uses them a lot.
I'm too pedantic to let this slide. An em-dash — is a single dash, the width of an m. An en-dash – is a single dash the width of an n
On that note, are em dashes and en dashes identical in monospace fonts, if every letter is the same width?
Edit: I tested this on a few monospace fonts, and they have a character for en dashes but not em dashes
If we're going to be pedantic, the em is a unit of width that depends on the font, but not necessarily the with off an m. Some texts apparently used to define it as the width of the capital M, but this definition is obsolete. source
So that’s where the name comes from. I never would’ve guessed it was something this straightforward :)
I don't use AI much. Is it actually using two dashes? 'Cause an em dash is its own character: "—" vs
--I had to put those in manually with the
—html entity in the pre utf-8 web days.You're right. I've always just typed two hyphens and called it good but technically it should be one long dash.
Haha, yeah, I probably wouldn't have learned to care that much if design clients didn't yell at me about it 20 years ago.
Why not just use one dash....?
I believe an em dash is a legitimate, albeit not common outside of written works, grammatical thingamadoo.
They’re quite common if you use iOS. The autocorrect changes 2 regular -‘s into one — em dash.
Well yes, iOS does those grammatical changes.
What I mean is the em dash is less common today then in the past, but the wealth of written works including them has “trained” AI that humans use it everywhere.
Too bad we only accept grammatical thingamajigs and thingamabobs as non-AI
I think thingamawhosits are allowed also?