Empwrd

09/14/2025

In typography, the emdash was designed to match the width of a capital M, hence “emdash”.

There’s two others;

The en dash is half as wide, and

The hyphen is narrower still, a third of an emdash.

Keyboards don’t usually have options for en or em dashes because:

1. These were designed for typesetters, not casual writing, and

2. Most modern readers don’t notice or care about the distinction. Or they didn’t until GPT came along. Unfortunately the emdash is now a dead giveaway for AI generated content.

This Gboard keyboard that I’m using, to its credit, has the option. It only took me 20 minutes to find it. All you have to do is go to the number and symbol page, find the hyphen, long press it, then select the actual dash/hyphen that you want from the popup bubble. Simple as…

I’m thinking to add some emdashes to my own prose just to confuse people.