DASH (PUNCTUATION)

A dash is a punctuation mark, and is different from a hyphen. Several forms exist: the figure dash (‒), the en dash (–), the em dash (—), and the quotation dash (―).

The em dash may be used (in pairs) to distinguish parenthetical text. It may be thought of as a "strong" separator, used where a comma would not do the job. For example, "As I ran, I saw—My God!—no one was following."

It has become increasingly popular, particular in Britain, to use the en dash (with spaces on either side) for this purpose. For example, "As I ran, I saw – My God! – no one was following." American typesetting still generally favors the em dash with no spaces around it.

The en dash is also used to indicate a range of numbers, as in "see pages 96–122." In this form it is always set without spaces on either side.

The quotation dash is used to introduce quoted text.

Rendering dashes on computers

In Unicode, the figure dash, en dash, em dash, and quotation dash correspond to characters U+2012, U+2013, U+2014, and U+2015, respectively.

The HTML entity names for the en dash and the em dash are – and —, respectively. The equivalent HTML numeric character entity references are – and —, respectively. Some web browsers (e.g. links) will not display these entities correctly when specified in numeric form, but almost all web browsers correctly display — and –.

On a typewriter, an em dash is traditionally represented by two hyphens, e.g. "--", and an en dash is typed exactly like a hyphen.

In TeX, an em dash is typed as three hyphens ("---"), an en dash as two hyphens ("--"), and a hyphen as one hyphen ("-").

See also: meta:MediaWiki User's Guide: Creating special characters.

External link

• Chicago Manual of Style - Q & A - Hyphens, En Dashes, Em Dashes