# Can I "fix" the mapping of -- to en dash with "Watched Words" (or in some other way)? **URL:** \ **Category:** Feature\ **Created:** [November 3, 2021, 2:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-i-fix-the-mapping-of-to-en-dash-with-watched-words-or-in-some-other-way/208118 "2021-11-03T14:57:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![mattdm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mattdm/32/216484_2.png) [@mattdm](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mattdm)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2021, 2:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-i-fix-the-mapping-of-to-en-dash-with-watched-words-or-in-some-other-way/208118/1 "2021-11-03T14:57:22Z")
For probably perfectly-well intended reasons, Discourse replaces `--` with `–`, an en dash, and `---` with `—`, an em dash. I find this a minor irritation, because when people use `--` in writing in email (or on the olden days in a typewriter), they _almost always_ mean to use an em dash. En dash is only used in several fairly obscure cases, like range of numbers or times (“The party goes from 7–9 pm”), scores or voting results (“She won in a landslide, 78–22!”), or occasionally for complex adjectives (“World War I–era”). All of these use cases are represented by a _single_ `-` character on a typewriter or normal keyboard, and most people’s writings. So basically, what Discourse does is _almost always wrong_ (for a highly-pedantic value of “wrong”). I feel like suggesting that this is a bug that should be fixed globally is _probably_ tilting at windmills, so I’m wondering how to configure my site locally so it at least _that_ doesn’t bug me. I thought about using the word replacement feature, but that seems to also mess up cases where one uses `---------` or similar for horizontal rules or headings in Markdown. Any other ideas? --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-i-fix-the-mapping-of-to-en-dash-with-watched-words-or-in-some-other-way/208118)._