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Technical Tips
07 Nov 2015 at 12:32 PM PST
Updated 1 year ago

The Em Dash in WordPress

By Book Cave

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Are you an author using WordPress for your websites and you wish you could easily add em dashes (long dashes) to your pages and posts? For those of you who haven’t already figured this out, here is how it’s done.

The WordPress editor, for both pages and posts, has a tool bar that looks something like this:

wordpress-longdash1 @ Book Cave - content-rated books

Your own toolbar may look slightly different, depending on your theme and installed plugins. For example, this toolbar has an “MBC Settings” button that is exclusive to Book Cave.

If the bottom row of buttons (the one with the “Paragraph” dropdown) is not showing for you, click the “Toolbar Toggle” button to make it appear.

wordpress-longdash2 @ Book Cave - content-rated books

To add the long dash (also called em dash), click the “Special character” (Ω) button on the bottom row, about middle. Yes, I did use the “Special charater” button to add the Greek letter omega (Ω) to this post! Math symbols, accented characters, currency symbols: they are all available through this button.

wordpress-longdash5 @ Book Cave - content-rated books

And as an additional tip, the em dash is almost always used with NO spacing before and after—so it looks like this. The only exception is if you’re writing for a newspaper or magazine that uses the AP Stylebook. (However, we have noticed a lot of book authors across the pond using spacing.)

If you have any questions, post them below in the comments section and we will do our best to answer them. And please share this page on social media to help other authors!

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Copyright 2015 by Book Cave
Reuse notice: Non-commercial users, feel free to print out “The Em Dash in Wordpress” for personal use or give to friends, share online, or make a meme of, as long as you attribute and link back to this post. Commercial users, you may share a link to this post or quote a short excerpt from it with attribution and a link to this site, but you may not use this post in its entirety. Thank you for caring about copyright.

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Comments

  1. Miquel
    Miquel • 2 years ago

    Thank you!

    Reply
  2. Lady
    Lady • 3 years ago

    Before discovering this, I used to type in a double dash — and then open up the Replace function, search for the double dash in the first box (what you want to replace), then move to the second box (what you want inserted instead), then hit “Special” (at the bottom of the page), and insert “Em dash” or “En dash,” depending on what I wanted.

    Reply
  3. Med Advice
    Med Advice • 3 years ago

    I m having a different problem with the em dash. Once I publish, my double hyphens turn into a single hyphen instead of an em dash. Does anyone have any ideas on this, or have the same problem?

    Reply
  4. Worries
    Worries • 3 years ago

    There are many ways to create em dashes and en dashes on your laptop. If your only option is to use the character map (the least efficient option), consider inserting two hyphens for em dashes in your document for now. You can then use your word processor’s find and replace function to replace the hyphens with the correct symbol later. Do you use a Mac? Let us know how you insert em dashes and en dashes into your writing in the comments section below.

    Reply
  5. APKun
    APKun • 3 years ago

    As I said above, To make an em dash, you really do have to type: mdash ; #8212 ; (remove the spaces)

    Reply
  6. APKun
    APKun • 3 years ago

    Heya i’m for the first time here. I came across this board and I find It really useful it helped me out a lot. I hope to give something back and help others like you helped me.

    Reply
  7. Medhelpsis.Com
    Medhelpsis.Com • 3 years ago

    I only wish there was a similar replacement for quotes. In German it‘s „quotes“ instead of “quotes”. Well, we can still use a plugin for that purpose. ??

    Reply
  8. Medhyps
    Medhyps • 3 years ago

    I wish I knew how to make WordPress stop breaking after real minus signs; I m tired of seeing values like -ps get split with the minus sign on one line and the rest on the other. ??

    Reply
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