It's twice as long as the en dash, and is used most often in a sentence to set apart two independent but related ideas. There are other uses for it too, but these are the most frequent ones. Its purpose is to show a range, as in: Boston beat Miami 98–83.Īn en dash also shows a connection between two places, like New York–Boston corridor. Sometimes it's used to avoid doubling vowels, as in pre-empt or co-operate.Īn en dash is slightly longer than a hyphen. It is used to join two words together that express a single idea. It's the key next to the zero on a regular keyboard. How?Ī hyphen is the smallest dash available. Eventually, after reading it a couple of times, they may realize that the hyphen is standing in for an em dash.įortunately, this problem can be easily avoided, as it's fairly simple to ensure you're entering the right dash - hyphen, en or em - in your writing.
Doing this makes the copy awkward and forces the reader to reread the sentence to figure out its meaning.
In formal writing, however, you can't get away with using a hyphen instead of an en dash.Īnd you definitely can't use a hyphen instead of a em dash. When you use a hyphen where you should use an en dash, it's usually not a problem. Hyphens often creep into web copy in places where en dashes or em dashes belong.
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