Line Symbols and Text Dividers

What is the | symbol called, and how do you type it?

| is the vertical bar, which programmers call a pipe. On a US keyboard it shares a key with the backslash: hold Shift and press \. On Windows you can also hold Alt and type 124 on the numeric keypad. On a phone, switch to the number keyboard and then to its second page of symbols.

The box-drawing lines │ ┃ ║ are taller than | and meet the corners and joints in the box-drawing group, so use them for frames and tables.

How to make a divider line in Word

In Word for Windows, type three hyphens (---) on a line by themselves and press Enter, and Word turns them into a line across the page. Three underscores, equal signs, asterisks, tildes or number signs give other line styles. The line is a paragraph border, so you can change or remove it from Borders on the Home tab.

A Word line is formatting, so it doesn't come along when you paste into a text message or a bio. For those, copy one of the text lines on this page.

Making a text box with box-drawing characters

Unicode's Box Drawing block (U+2500 to U+257F) has lines, corners and joints that fit together: ┌ ─ ┐ along the top, │ down the sides and └ ─ ┘ along the bottom. The pieces line up only in a monospaced font, where every character has the same width.

In apps that format code, such as a code block in Discord, a box keeps its shape. In a normal font the right edge can drift, so check the result before you post it.

Which line symbols are in ASCII?

Only a few line characters are plain ASCII, and every keyboard can type them: the hyphen-minus -, the underscore _, the equals sign =, the vertical bar | and the tilde ~. Lines made from them, like ---------- or ==========, work everywhere, including code comments and plain-text email.

The box-drawing lines ─ │ ┌ are not ASCII. Old IBM PCs had them in an extended character set, code page 437, and today they're Unicode characters.

Sources and standards

• Unicode — Box Drawing code chart (U+2500–U+257F)
• Unicode — Block Elements code chart (U+2580–U+259F)
• Unicode — Geometric Shapes code chart (U+25A0–U+25FF)
• Unicode — Dingbats code chart (U+2700–U+27BF)
• Unicode — General Punctuation code chart (U+2000–U+206F)
• Unicode — Code page 437 to Unicode mapping (CP437.TXT)
• Microsoft — Insert a horizontal line in Word
• Microsoft — Insert ASCII or Unicode Latin-based symbols and characters
• Microsoft — Keyboard shortcuts to add language accent marks in Word and Outlook
• WHATWG — HTML named character references

Frequently asked questions