Dash

Not to be confused with Hyphen.
–

Punctuation
apostrophe ( ’ ' )
brackets ( [ ], ( ), { }, ⟨ ⟩ )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
dash ( ‒, –, —, ― )
ellipsis ( …, ... )
exclamation mark ( ! )
full stop/period ( . )
guillemets ( « » )
hyphen ( -, ‐ )
question mark ( ? )
quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ” )
semicolon ( ; )
slash/stroke ( / )
solidus ( ⁄ )
Word dividers
space ( ) ( ) ( ) (␠) (␢) (␣)
interpunct ( · )
General typography
ampersand ( & )
at sign ( @ )
asterisk ( * )
backslash ( \ )
bullet ( • )
caret ( ^ )
copyright symbol ( © )
currency (generic) ( ¤ )
currency (specific)
₳ ฿ ₵ ¢ ₡ ₢ ₠ $ ₫ Indian Rupee symbol.svg ৳ ₯ € ƒ ₣ ₲ ₴ ₭ ℳ ₥ ₦ ₧ ₱ ₰ £ ₨ ₪ Kazakhstani tenge symbol.svg ₮ ₩ ¥
dagger ( †, ‡ )
degree ( ° )
ditto mark ( 〃 )
inverted exclamation mark ( ¡ )
inverted question mark ( ¿ )
number sign/pound/hash ( # )
numero sign ( № )
ordinal indicator ( º, ª )
percent etc. ( %, ‰, ‱ )
pilcrow ( )
prime ( ′ )
registered trademark ( ® )
section sign ( § )
service mark ( ℠ )
sound recording copyright ( ℗ )
tilde ( ~ )
trademark ( ™ )
underscore/understrike ( _ )
vertical/broken bar, pipe ( |, ¦ )
Uncommon typography
asterism ( ⁂ )
tee ( ⊤ )
up tack ( ⊥ )
index/fist ( ☞ )
therefore sign ( ∴ )
because sign ( ∵ )
interrobang ( ‽ )
irony & sarcasm punctuation ( ؟ )
lozenge ( ◊ )
reference mark ( ※ )
tie ( ⁀ )

A dash is a punctuation mark. It is similar in appearance to a hyphen, but a dash is longer and it is used differently. The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).

Contents

Common dashes

There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are:

glyph Unicode[1] HTML[2] HTML/XML[3] TeX Windows Char Codes Mac Keyboard Codes
figure dash ‒ U+2012 (8210) none ‒ or ‒ or - none
en dash – U+2013 (8211) – – or – -- ALT + 0150 Option + -
em dash — U+2014 (8212) — — or — --- ALT + 0151 Option + _
horizontal bar ― U+2015 (8213) none ― or ― none
swung dash \sim U+2053 (8275) none ⁓ or ⁓ \~{}

Figure dash

The figure dash (‒) is so named because it is the same width as a digit, at least in typefaces with digits of equal width.

The figure dash is used when a dash must be used within numbers. This does not indicate a range (for which the en dash is used), or function as the minus sign (which also has its own glyph).

The figure dash is often unavailable; in this case, one may use a hyphen-minus instead. In Unicode, the figure dash is U+2012 (decimal 8210). HTML authors must use the numeric forms ‒ or ‒ to type it unless the file is in Unicode; there is no equivalent character entity. In TeX, the standard fonts have no figure dash; however, the digits normally all have the same width as the en dash, so an en dash can be substituted in TeX.

En dash

The en dash, or n dash, n-rule, etc., (–) is usually half the width of an em dash.

The en dash is used in ranges, such as 6–10 years, read as "six to ten years".

Ranges of values

The en dash is commonly used to indicate a closed range (a range with clearly defined and non-infinite upper and lower boundaries) of values, such as those between dates, times, or numbers.[4][5][6][7]

Some examples of this usage:

The Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) recommends that the word to be used instead of an en dash when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, such as a range of units. For example, "a voltage of 50 V to 100 V" rather than "a voltage of 50–100 V".

It is also considered inappropriate to use the en dash in place of the words to or and in phrases that follow the forms from ... to ... and between ... and ....[5][6]

Relationships and connections

The en dash can also be used to contrast values, or illustrate a relationship between two things.[4][7]

Some examples of this usage:

A "simple" compound used as an adjective is written with a hyphen; at least one authority considers name pairs, as in the Taft-Hartley Act to be "simple",[5] while most consider an en dash appropriate there[8] to represent the parallel relationship, as in the McCain–Feingold bill or Bose–Einstein statistics. (However, truly compound names are written with a hyphen, thus the Lennard-Jones potential is named after one person, while Bose and Einstein are two people.)

The Chicago Manual of Style limits the use of the en dash to two main purposes: to indicate ranges of time, money, or other amounts (or in certain other cases where it replaces the word to); and in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of the elements of the adjective is an open compound or when one of the elements is already hyphenated.[9] That is, the Chicago Manual of Style rules specify en dash in these:

but hyphens in these:

Compound adjectives

The en dash can be used instead of a hyphen in compound adjectives in which one part consists of two words or a hyphenated word:[5][6]

Usage guidelines

The en dash is used instead of a hyphen in compound adjectives for which neither part of the adjective modifies the other; that is, when each is modifying the noun. This is common in science, when names compose an adjective as in Bose–Einstein condensate. Compare this with "award-winning novel" in which "award" modifies "winning" and together they modify "novel". Contrast "Franco-Prussian War", "Anglo-Saxon", etc., in which the first element does not strictly modify the second, but a hyphen is still normally used because the two elements behave as a single compound term. The Chicago Manual of Style recognizes but does not mandate this usage and uses a hyphen in Bose-Einstein condensate.[9]

En dashes normally do not have spaces around them. An exception is made when avoiding spaces may cause confusion or look odd (e.g., 12 June – 3 July; contrast 12 June–3 July).[10] However, in rare situations when an en dash is unavailable—such as when using typewriters or character encodings not including the en dash character—it may be substituted with a hyphen-minus with a single space on each side (" - ").

Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level

Like em dashes, en dashes can be used instead of colons, or pairs of commas that mark off a nested clause or phrase. They can also be used around parenthetical expressions—such as this one—in place of the em dashes preferred by some publishers, particularly where short columns are used, since em dashes can look awkward at the end of a line. See En dash versus em dash, below. In these situations, en dashes must have a single space on each side.

Electronic usage

In Unicode, the en dash is U+2013 (decimal 8211). In HTML, one may use the numeric forms – or –; there is also an HTML entity –. In TeX, the en dash may normally (depending on the font) be input as a double hyphen-minus (--). On a computer running the Mac OS X operating system, most keyboard layouts map an en dash to ⌥-hyphen. On Microsoft Windows, an en dash may be entered as Alt+0150 (where the digits are typed on the numeric keypad while holding down the Alt key).

The en dash is sometimes used as a substitute for the minus sign, when the minus sign character is not available, since the en dash is usually the same width as a plus sign. For example, the original 8-bit Macintosh character set had an en dash, useful for minus sign, years before Unicode with a dedicated minus sign was available. The hyphen-minus is usually too narrow to make a typographically acceptable minus sign. But the en dash cannot be used for a minus in programming languages because the syntax usually requires a hyphen-minus; because programming languages are usually set in a fixed-pitch (monospaced) font face, the hyphen-minus looks acceptable there.

Em dash

The em dash (—), or m dash, m-rule, etc., often demarcates a parenthetical thought or some similar interpolation, such as the following from Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine:

At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons.

It is also used to indicate that a sentence is unfinished because the speaker has been interrupted. For example, the em dash is used in the following way in Joseph Heller's Catch-22:

He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. He was—
"Crazy!" Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. "That's what you are! Crazy!"
"—immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman."

Similarly, it can be used instead of an ellipsis to indicate aposiopesis, the rhetorical device by which a sentence is stopped short not because of interruption but because the speaker is too emotional to continue, such as Darth Vader's line "I sense something, a presence I have not felt since—" in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

The term em dash derives from its defined width of one em, which is the length, expressed in points, by which font sizes are typically specified. Thus in 9-point type, an em is 9 points wide, while the em of 24-point type is 24 points wide, and so on. (By comparison, the en dash, with its 1-en width, is ½ em wide in most fonts.[11])

The em dash is used in much the way a colon or a set of parentheses is used; it can show an abrupt change in thought or be used where a full stop (or "period") is too strong and a comma too weak. Em dashes are sometimes used in lists or definitions, but that is a style guide issue; a colon is often recommended for use instead.

According to most American sources (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style) and to some British sources (e.g., The Oxford Guide to Style), an em dash should always be set closed (not surrounded by spaces). But the practice in some parts of the English-speaking world, including the style recommended by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (because of the narrow width of newspaper columns), sets it open (separates it from its surrounding words by using spaces  or hair spaces (U+200A)) when it is being used parenthetically. Some writers, finding the em dash unappealingly long, prefer to use an open-set en dash. This "space, en dash, space" sequence is also the predominant style in German and French typography. See En dash versus em dash below.

In Canada, The Canadian Style [A Guide to Writing and Editing], The Oxford Canadian of Grammar, Spelling & Punctuation, Guide to Canadian English Usage [Second Edition], Editing Canadian English Manual, and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary are all defined NO SPACE before or after em dashes when they are inserted between words, a word and numeral, or two numerals.

In Australia, the Style manual [For authors, editors and printers, Sixth edition], also defines NO SPACE before or after em dashes when inserted between words, a word and numeral, or two numerals. A section on the 2-em rule (——) also explains that the 2-em can be used to mark an abrupt break in direct or reported speech, but a space is used before the 2-em if a complete word is missing, while no space is used if part of a word exists before the sudden break. Two examples include:

     I distinctly heard him say, 'Go away or I'll ——'.

and

     It was alleged that D—— had been threatened with blackmail.

Monospaced fonts (such as Courier) that mimic the look of a typewriter have the same width for all characters. Some of these fonts have em and en dashes which more or less fill the monospaced width they have available. For example, the sequence hyphen, en dash, em dash, minus will show as "- – — −" in a monospace font. Typewriters often only have a single hyphen glyph, so it is common to use two monospace hyphens strung together (--) to serve as an em dash.

When an actual em dash is unavailable—as in the ASCII character set—a double ("--") or triple hyphen-minus ("---") is used. In Unicode, the em dash is U+2014 (decimal 8212). In HTML, one may use the numeric forms — or —; there is also the HTML entity —. In TeX, the em dash may normally be input as a triple hyphen-minus (---). On any Mac, most keyboard layouts map an em dash to Shift-Option-hyphen. On Microsoft Windows, an em dash may be entered as Alt+0151, where the digits are typed on the numeric keypad while holding the Alt key down. It can also be entered into Microsoft Office applications by using the Ctrl-Alt-hyphen combination.

En dash versus em dash

The en dash is wider than the hyphen but not as wide as the em dash. An em width is the point size of the currently used font, since the M character is not always the width of the point size.[12]

Traditionally an em dash—like so—or a spaced em dash — like so — has been used for a dash in running text. The Canadian The Elements of Typographic Style recommends the more concise spaced en dash – like so – and argues that the length and visual magnitude of an em dash "belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography." The spaced en dash is also the house style for certain major publishers (Penguin, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge among them, all British). However, some longstanding typographical guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style still recommend unspaced em dashes for this purpose. The Oxford Guide to Style (2002, section 5.10.10) acknowledges that the spaced en dash is used by "other British publishers", but states that the Oxford University Press—like 'most US publishers'—uses the unspaced em dash. In practice, there is little consensus, and it is a matter of personal or house taste; however, U.S. usage tends toward the em over the en for this usage.

The en dash (always with spaces, in running text) and the spaced em dash both have a certain technical advantage over the unspaced em dash. In most typesetting and most word processing, the spacing between words is expected to be variable, so there can be full justification. Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables this for the words between which it falls. This can lead to uneven spacing in the text.

En dashes may be preferred to em dashes when text is set in narrow columns (as in newspapers and similar publications), due to the fact that the en dash is smaller. In such cases, use of the en dash is based purely on space considerations and is not necessarily related to other typographical concerns.

The spaced em dash risks introducing excessive separation of words; it is already long, and the spaces increase the separation. In full justification, the adjacent spaces may be stretched, and the separation of words further exaggerated.

Horizontal bar

The horizontal bar or quotation dash (―) is used to introduce quoted text. This is the standard method of printing dialogue in some languages (see the quotation dash section of the Quotation mark, non-English usage article for further details of how it is used). The em dash is equally suitable if the quotation dash is unavailable or is contrary to the house's style.

In Unicode, the quotation dash is U+2015 (decimal 8213). In HTML, it can be input only with the numeric form, ― or ―; there is no equivalent character entity. But for web pages one generally uses the em dash. There is no support in the standard TeX fonts, but one can use \hbox{---}\kern-.5em--- instead (or just use an em dash).

The Chicago Manual of Style says about this usage: “Em dashes are occasionally used instead of quotation marks (mainly by French writers) to set off dialogue.” However, it makes no mention of the horizontal bar or the quotation dash.

Swung dash

Main article: Tilde#Punctuation

The swung dash (⁓ or ~) resembles a lengthened tilde, and is used to separate alternatives or approximates. In dictionaries, it is frequently used to stand in for the defined term in example text. This character was added since Unicode 4.0.0. Note that there are several similar characters: U+2053 ⁓​ swung dash (used in Western typography), U+223C ∼​ tilde operator (used in mathematics), U+301C 〜​ wave dash (used in East Asian typography), and Error using {{unichar}}: Input "U+FF5E" is not a hexadecimal value (expected: like "09AF") .

Example:

The swung dash in Unicode is U+2053 (decimal 8275). In HTML, it can be input only with the numeric form, ⁓ or ⁓ there is no equivalent HTML entity.

In TeX and LaTeX, one can use the math mode command $\sim$, which yields the tilde operator, a similar character.

In Japanese, similar characters—the wave dash and the full-width tilde—are used instead for a variety of purposes, for example:

In Chinese, the wave dash and the em dash can be used interchangeably to express a range.

Dash-like characters

There are several characters which resemble dashes but have different meanings and uses. These include (though by no means are restricted to):

Rendering dashes on computers

Typewriters and computers have traditionally had only a limited character set, often having no key with which to produce a dash. In consequence, it became common to substitute the nearest incorrect punctuation mark or symbol. Em dashes are often represented by a pair of spaces surrounding a single hyphen-minus (typical British usage) or by a pair of spaces surrounding two hyphen-minuses (mostly in the United States).

Modern computer software typically has support for many more characters, and is usually capable of rendering both the en and em dashes correctly—albeit sometimes with a little inconvenience for the user who has to input them. Some software, though, may operate in a more limited mode. Some text editors, for example, are restricted to working with a single 8-bit character encoding, and when unencodable characters are entered (e.g., by pasting from the clipboard), they are often blindly converted to question marks. Sometimes this happens to em and en dashes, even when the 8-bit encoding supports them, or when an alternative representation using hyphen-minuses would seem to be an option.

Any kind of dash can manifest directly in an HTML document, but HTML also allows them to be entered as character entity references. The entity names for the em dash and the en dash are mdash and ndash; therefore, they can be referenced in HTML as — and –. The equivalent numeric character references are — and –. Nearly all web browsers and operating systems used today are capable of rendering the numeric form, and almost as many correctly display the named form.

In professionally printed documents, a typographer sometimes adds hair space, or, rarely, a full inter-word space, on either side of an em dash. In HTML it is possible to generate a hair space using the numeric character reference   or the named entity  , but current-generation web browsers are not uniformly supportive of this character, and may render it incorrectly.

References

  1. ↑ Characters in Unicode are referenced in prose via the "U+" notation. The hexadecimal number after the "U+" is the character's Unicode code point. The decimal equivalent is shown in parentheses.
  2. ↑ Specifically, the predefined character entity reference that can be used in an HTML document in place of a literal dash.
  3. ↑ Specifically, the numeric character reference that can be used in an HTML or XML document in place of a literal dash.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Griffith, Benjamin W., et al. (2004). Pocket Guide to Correct Grammar. Barron's Pocket Guides. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series. ISBN 0-7641-2690-3. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Judd, Karen (2001). Copyediting: A Practical Guide. Menlo Park, Calif: Crisp Publications. ISBN 1-56052-608-4. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Loberger, Gordon; Kate Shoup Welsh (2001). Webster's new world English grammar handbook. New York: Hungry Minds. ISBN 0-7645-6488-9. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Ives, George B. (1921). Text, Type and Style: A Compendium of Atlantic Usage. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. 
  8. ↑ Garner, B: Modern American Usage, Second Edition, page 657. Oxford University Press, 2003.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 The Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. pp. 261–265. ISBN 0-226-10403-6. 
  10. ↑ Shaw, Harry (1986). Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers. p. 185. ISBN 0-06-097047-2. 
  11. ↑ Ritter, R.M. (2002). The Oxford Guide to Style. Oxford University Press. p. 140. ISBN 0198691750. "The en rule is, as its name indicates, an en in length, which makes it longer than a hyphen and half the length of an em rule." 
  12. ↑ "A glossary of typographic terms". Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/uk/type/topics/glossary.html#ememspaceemquad. Retrieved 2007-10-18. 

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