While reading the Gutenberg eBook of The King in Yellow I noticed I noticed the line “that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C——.” You often see that sort of “censorship” in 19th century English writing, but I had no idea what the term for it was. I discovered that it’s called a “fillet”
Wikipedia does not provide a guide to tell if it’s pronounced as in “-o-fish” or if it rhymes with “kill it.” The Cambridge online dictionary says it’s pronounced with a hard T. But on the other hand, it also says Americans pronounce the cut of meat form of the word that way, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. So take that for what it’s worth.
With a little more investigation, I figured out the ebook, as well as the fillet wikipedia entry, use two em-dashes to form the single character. Playing around with a couple of fonts on my phone, it appears most fonts tend to display multiple ems as a single character. Your mileage may vary, but I see the following as single lines:
1 em: —
2 ems: ——
3 ems: ———
4 ems: With most fonts, the fourth em dash and beyond are separated and begin to form their own fillet: ———— and —————
(you’ll note a subtle break after the first three ems).
There are double and triple em dash length single characters in Unicode: ”⸺” (U+2E3A) and ”⸻” (U+2E3B). So you can use the single character versions in most cases, in place of stacking up em dashes.
To learn more than you ever imagined there was to know about small horizontal lines: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash