Doppelstrich

Doppelstrich, literally “double stroke,” is a term used in typography and text processing to describe a punctuation construct formed by two adjacent dash-like marks. Historically, it referred to the practice of representing a long dash by two consecutive hyphens, especially in typewriter and early printer contexts. In modern typography, this approach has largely been replaced by the single em dash (Gedankenstrich), which provides a more consistent width and spacing.

Historically, many printed texts used two hyphens (--), which could render inconsistently depending on the font and spacing. As typesetting standards evolved, editors adopted the em dash (—) for interruptions or abrupt turns in thought, and the use of a “double hyphen” as a stand-in fell out of favor in professional typography. Some style guides explicitly discourage relying on a doppelstrich for readability and typographic quality.

In contemporary practice, the term doppelstrich is mostly historical or regional. The standard German punctuation guide treats the em dash as the primary dash for breaks or emphatic interruptions, while the en dash (–) serves for ranges and certain compound terms. The double hyphen is generally avoided in polished typesetting, though it may still appear in plain text, digital coding, or legacy documents.

In computing and programming contexts, a sequence of two hyphens (--) may have syntactic meaning, such as starting a single-line comment in several languages. In Unicode, the em dash is a distinct character (U+2014) and the en dash (U+2013), while a double hyphen remains a pair of ordinary hyphen characters rather than a dedicated symbol.