This is an em dash: —
You can type it with Alt+0151. That’s what I do on my desktop computer. On my laptop I don’t have the keypad to do that, so I use AutoHotkey to type an em dash whenever I type two hyphens and an M: –m = —.
Em dashes are often thought nowadays to be a sign of LLM-generated text, especially, I guess, by ChatGPT. This is partially because the em dash is non-trivial for many human computer operators to produce. Then you always get people who bitch and moan that they love the em dash and they don’t like being accused of being an LLM just because they know how to write. Saddy sad.
I am a prolific user of em dashes in my writing. However, you can tell it’s really me, and not an LLM, because I use them in a way you’re not really supposed to— I use them like this. Yes— with a space on the right side but not on the left. Typically people use em dashes with no spaces on either side, and rarely people use them with spaces on both sides, but I use em dashes with a space on one side, like a comma.
I am not trying to be ~*unique*~. The reason that I use em dashes with one space is that it preserves the exact word count of my documents. Words that touch each other through an em dash are often combined into one word for the purpose of tallying. No, it doesn’t make a huge difference in the end, but it pisses me off. It makes me neurotic. Intriguingly, WordPress’s word counter seems immune to this. But even if all word counters started working like that, I’ve been using em dashes this way too long to stop. I like to think that my askew em dashes gives my text a certain identifiable style, like Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy famously didn’t use quotation marks and described semicolons and other punctuation marks as “idiocy,” but he also wrote “might of” in Blood Meridian, so who’s the idiot now?