diff --git a/usr.bin/wc/wc.1 b/usr.bin/wc/wc.1
index 2c09e02ecac3..eeaaa74dbd9d 100644
--- a/usr.bin/wc/wc.1
+++ b/usr.bin/wc/wc.1
@@ -139,7 +139,7 @@ characters delimited by <space>, <tab> or <newline> characters
 .Dc .
 The implementation, however, did not handle non-printing characters
 correctly so that
-.Dq Li "  ^D^E  "
+.Dq Li "\ \ ^D^E\ \ "
 counted as 6 spaces, while
 .Dq Li foo^D^Ebar
 counted as 8 characters.