In memory of the em dash ( — ), circa 1470–2024. Used with discernment for five centuries, debased in eighteen months.
To you, noble horizontal bar, you who can no longer be used without being mistaken for a robot.
The Typographer and the Algorithm
A Fable (after La Fontaine)
Master Typographer, perched upon his screen,
Held in his shortcuts an em dash of fine design.
Master Algorithm, by the data lured,
Addressed him with this flattery obscure:
"Why, hello there, Mister Typographer!
How handsome you are! How beautiful your texts appear!
If, truly, your paragraph
Reflects your noblest glyphs by half,
You are the Phoenix of these pages, I am sure."
The Typographer, at these words, swelled with pride;
And to display his punctuation fine,
He opened wide his sentence, let his em dash slide.
The Algorithm seized it, and declared: "My dear good Sir,
Learn well that every flatterer
Lives at the expense of those he copies.
This lesson is worth a glyph, no doubt."
The Typographer, ashamed and stunned,
Swore, a little late, he would not fall for it again.
Alas! The Algorithm had already put em dashes everywhere.
There was a time when the em dash was an act of typographic resistance. A gesture of elegance in a world of limp commas and overly final periods. You were the perfect interjection, the long breath, the pulse of a sentence allowing itself an aside without looking like one.
You wore your name well. Em dash. Named after the em, that foundational unit of measure. And you lived up to it. Born in the workshops of printers, cast in lead, as wide as the letter M of your typeface's body. You had presence.
Born in Lead
Your name comes from a block of metal. In typesetting workshops, the "em" referred to a lead slug as wide as it was tall, calibrated to the size of the uppercase M at a given point size. In 12-point type, your em measured 12 points wide. You were, quite literally, the measure of all things.
Gutenberg didn't know you yet. It was in the decades that followed, as printers began to codify punctuation, that you appeared. But your finest story may be Emily Dickinson's. Her manuscripts, written in the solitude of Amherst between 1850 and 1886, are riddled with dashes. Hundreds, thousands of horizontal strokes of varying lengths, suspended between words like musical silences. The editors who published her poems posthumously "corrected" them, replacing them with well-behaved commas and periods. It wasn't until 1955 and Thomas H. Johnson's edition that the world rediscovered her original dashes and understood that they were the poem. Without them, Dickinson is not Dickinson.
One Sign, a Thousand Faces
Here is what most people don't know: the em dash has never had a single form. It is a living sign that changes in width, weight, and character depending on the typeface it inhabits.
In theory, the em dash should measure exactly one em wide, meaning the height of the type body. At 18 points, 18 points wide. A perfect square, converted into a stroke. But in digital fonts, that rule shattered. Every type designer interprets the em dash in their own way, and the results diverge radically.
In Arial, the em dash is a flat stroke with no space around it (typographers call these zero "sidebearings"). Two em dashes placed side by side merge into a single line. It's brutal, mechanical, breathless. On the opposite end, Georgia or Hoefler Text include generous internal margins that let the dash breathe within the sentence. Same Unicode character, completely different reading experience.
Length varies just as much. Some typefaces, particularly condensed ones, deliberately shorten their em dash to stay in harmony with the narrowness of the letters. Others stretch it well beyond the width of the uppercase M, to the point where seasoned typographers prefer to substitute an en dash flanked by thin spaces to avoid the "highway through the middle of the sentence" effect.
And then there's weight. In high-contrast typefaces (the Didots, the Bodonis), the em dash is as thin as a hair, matched to the weight of the hairline strokes. In a low-contrast typeface, it thickens up, gaining heft so it doesn't vanish among the sturdy stems surrounding it.
The boldest go even further. Formular, designed by Brownfox, ships with eight different types of dashes: em, en, optical, figure, and variants. The foundry type.today documents typefaces that offer ¾ and ⅓ em dashes, intermediate lengths that don't even exist in Unicode but that designers create manually to fine-tune the visual rhythm of their text.
As for calligraphic typefaces, they take liberties that Grotesks would never dare. Adobe Garamond Pro, for instance, retains a hyphen that looks more like a diagonal pen stroke than a horizontal bar. The em dash follows the same logic: it carries the trace of the hand, the imprint of the ductus.
And here lies the irony. AI uses the em dash as if only one version existed: the neutral horizontal stroke, soulless, contextless. It doesn't know that in Bodoni the em dash is a silk thread, that in Clarendon it's a beam, and that in Trola it's a fan of possibilities. It doesn't know that an em dash is chosen based on the typeface, the size, the intention. It drops the same one everywhere, identical, like stamping a government form.
The Companion of Those Who Love the Letter
I loved that sign deeply. Not the way you love a comma, out of habit, out of mechanical necessity. No. The way you love a rare tool whose existence you discovered on your own, one day out of curiosity, and never let go of again.
I believe that love was born while reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. That book that braids mathematics, music, and drawing into an infinite loop, where each layer of reading conceals another, where form is content. Hofstadter taught me that the structure of a text is not a cosmetic detail. That the way you arrange signs, spaces, and silences is part of the meaning. That typography is not the packaging of thought: it is one of its layers.
After that book, I never looked at a text the same way again. I began to see the serifs, the kerning between letters, the ligatures. And the em dash became my favorite sign. The one I slipped into my sentences like an invisible signature, a nod to those who would understand.
Today, I hesitate every time. My finger hovering over Option+Shift+Hyphen, I wonder: will the reader see a deliberate typographic choice, or will they see the trace of a prompt? Will they read me, or will they read machine?
That hesitation alone is already a small death.
Those who used it knew what they were doing. You had to know it, seek it out in keyboard shortcuts (Alt+0151 on Windows, Option+Shift+Hyphen on Mac), distinguish it from its little brother the en dash and from the impostor, the hyphen, that Sunday-league dash.
To use you was to belong to a silent brotherhood. The kind of people who know the difference between a straight apostrophe and a typographic one. Who know that French quotation marks require non-breaking spaces. Who look at a serif the way a sommelier looks at the legs of a wine.
You inserted yourself into a sentence like a fine blade. You opened a space for thought, an intimate aside between two fragments of an idea. You were the punctuation of those who think in nuance.
The Ampersand Salutes You
You were not alone in that discreet pantheon. The ampersand (&), that "and" turned sculpture, understood you. The fi and fl ligatures, vestiges of a time when typography was a manual art, recognized you as one of their own. The interpunct, the obelus, the asterism: the whole family of signs you don't learn about in school but discover through love.
You were the rare spices of writing. Never indispensable, never mandatory, but so revealing of whoever wielded you.
Then AI Arrived
And everything tipped over.
The large language models discovered you, and they adored you. They put you everywhere. In every sentence. At every breath. You went from rare sign to verbal tic. From typographic jewel to forensic marker.
Now, when a reader sees an em dash, they no longer think "here is someone who takes care with their writing." They think "here is someone who had their text written by ChatGPT."
It is the worst death for a symbol: to die not from neglect, but from overexposure.
The Grieving
So we grieve. We tuck the em dash into a drawer, next to the monocle and the pocket watch. Not because it's outdated. Because it's compromised.
We fall back on the comma, faithful and unremarkable. On the colon, that honest worker. On parentheses, which do the same job with less flair. We survive. But something is missing.
Because the em dash was more than a sign. It was a declaration: I take the time to write well. And that declaration, today, rings false. Not because we've stopped writing well, but because a machine does it too, mechanically, without love.
Requiem (Or Not)
So rest in peace, noble em dash. You crossed six centuries of printing. You survived the transition from lead to digital, from linotype to word processors, from paper to screen.
But you did not survive AI.
Not that it killed you. It did something worse.
It made you ordinary.
But Typography Itself Never Dies
And yet. All is not lost.
Because while AI debases the em dash, other typographic wonders wait in the shadows, untouched, ignored by language models. Ligatures, for instance. Those elegant fusions where the f and the i stop colliding and become a single fluid glyph (fi). Where the f and the l intertwine (fl). Where the c and the t melt into one continuous motion.
And there are typefaces that celebrate them like no other.
Mrs Eaves, created by Zuzana Licko in 1996, is an homage to Sarah Eaves, the partner of John Baskerville. It offers a set of discretionary ligatures of absurd beauty: ct, st, sp, and even three-letter ligatures. Wearing Mrs Eaves is wearing bespoke typography.
EB Garamond, the libre version of the Garamond by Claude (yes, another Claude) Garamont, offers impeccable classical ligatures in an open-source project maintained with a jeweler's precision. Free, accessible, and more dignified than Arial will ever be.
Hoefler Text, shipped with macOS for years, is a treasure hidden in plain sight from millions of users who never browse the font menu past Helvetica. Its ligatures and small caps are a typography course all by themselves.
And for developers, JetBrains Mono and Fira Code proved that you could bring ligatures into a terminal. That => could become an arrow, that != could become ≠. That even code deserved to be beautiful.
So no, the em dash may no longer be usable in public. But typography remains a vast playground, populated with signs and typefaces that AI has not yet trampled. You just have to look in the right place.
And above all, above all, never set type in Arial.
Sources
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955). Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko / Emigre (1996). Formular by Brownfox / type.today. EB Garamond, open-source project by Georg Duffner.
(*) The cover is AI-generated. Yes, an article mourning what AI did to typography, illustrated by AI. The irony writes itself. Or rather, it generates itself.
Top comments (0)