2025 Punctuation Mark of the Year

I’m calling it.

Today, September 24, is National Punctuation Day, and I’m declaring the em dash (—) the 2025 Punctuation Mark of the Year. 

It’s a title and honor that has languished since the New Yorker’s own “Comma Queen,” Mary Norris, offered up the apostrophe—in 2013.

We seldom see a typographical symbol—as a symbol—command so much attention in mainstream discourse.

But this year, the humble horizontal of the em dash—so named because it originally spanned the width of the letter “M,” or “em”—has been thrust into the spotlight.

It hasn’t left it either, if the ongoing churn of content on it is any measure.

The controversy—in case you missed it—is that the em dash is a telltale sign a piece of writing was generated by AI.

Countless posts have urged people—if they want to evade AI detection—to avoid the “ChatGPT hyphen,”¹ as the Gen Z podcast LuxeGen referred to the em dash in March. This event appears to have popularized the subject, though discussion dates back to at least the r/ChatGPT subreddit in October 2024.

Countless rebuttals have not only defended the versatile punctuation mark, an emphatic way to set off a clause, but also reminded us of its centuries of prominent, widespread use in writing—which LLMs are trained on, after all.

Do LLMs actually favor em dashes? We need more research and data.²

But certainly we—as humans—have been favoring the topic in 2025. 

Google queries for “AI em dash” shot consistently upwards this year starting at LuxeGen’s “ChatGPT hyphen” moment—while broader searches for “em dash meaning,” for instance, have tripled in relative interest in the same period.

Prior to 2025, articles on em dashes were niche: the domain of how-tos, style guides, and keyboard shortcuts. But pieces have proliferated in the media on the debate—and continue to see publication in big outlets up to this date.

Punctuation marks aren’t strangers to broader discussion in the digital age, especially in the context of tone and generational differences. The use of periods in text messages or exclamations points in professional writing are examples. Emoji—preceded by emoticons, which use punctuation marks and other characters to express emotion online—are often at the center of these conversations, including as a new form of punctuation.

Now the em dash stands at a world-historic intersection of concerns about our  humanity—and our tools.

In 2025, the em dash—dashed over our heads as we have been about it—has proven a fascinating, unexpected, and persistent focal point for our grappling with the seismic impact of AI in our human lives and endeavors.

That’s why I’ve crowned the em dash (—) the 2025 Punctuation Mark of the Year.

Technology shapes writing. Writing shapes technology. And at a moment where digital writing, from DMs to emails, defines so much of our daily lives, perhaps the matter of the em dash can offer an important reminder—that writing itself is a technology.

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For more on the topic, I recommend Grammar Girl’s breakdown from June.

1. Because it’s National Punctuation Day, it’s worth noting that the em dash is not a kind of hyphen. (Sorry, LuxeGen.) The hyphen is a short dash (-) most commonly used to join words, as in “fast-changing.” Neither are to be confused with the en dash (–), which is longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash and typically used to show ranges between figures, as in “2021–2025.” ↩︎
2. In July, Swiss researcher François Keck found that use of the em dash more than doubled in his sample (ecology abstracts) from before ChatGPT in 2021 to 2025. No other character came close. Is there anything more than correlation here between em dash use and the rise of ChatGPT? Even if there is, educational AI specialist Nick Potkalitsky is quick to explain why the reasons are complex. I discovered both of these articles from John Naughton in The Observer. ↩︎