Enter for a chance to win £100 Asda Photo Gift voucher! Note that dashes are rather informal and should be used carefully in writing. 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 for printed newspapers and the AP Stylebook, sets it open, separating it from its surrounding words by using spaces or hair spaces (U+200A) when it is being used parenthetically. The Australian government's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers (6th ed. A dash is a horizontal line that shows a pause or break in meaning, or that represents missing words or letters.
A spacing character usually showing a horizontal line below the, Used in programming languages (e.g. ), She is a know-it-all. 9 years ago.

There are three forms of dashes: em, en, and the double hyphen. These are the colors of the flag: red, white, and blue. When the dash is used in this way, it creates a compound adjective. Use a dash to indicate a summarising clause. Style guides outside the US are more variable. Preference for an en dash instead of a hyphen in these coordinate/relationship/connection types of terms is a matter of style, not inherent orthographic "correctness"; both are equally "correct", and each is the preferred style in some style guides. Unlike in English, the em dashes are spaced like brackets, i.e., there is a space between main sentence and dash, but not between parenthetical phrase and dash. Dashes can be are used as an alternative to other punctuation marks to. To me, a hyphen simply looks wrong where an em dash belongs. Also, try not to end two consecutive lines with hyphens. An em dash may be used to indicate omitted letters in a word redacted to an initial or single letter or to fillet a word, by leaving the start and end letters whilst replacing the middle letters with a dash or dashes (for the purposes of censorship or simply data anonymization). Enter for a chance to win 1 of 2 bundles of goodies worth over £40! The three-hyphen em dash proxy was popular with various publishers because the sequence of one, two, or three hyphens could then correspond to the hyphen, en dash, and em dash, respectively. Commas - neutralConnor, Amy's boyfriend, bought the tickets. [19] However, there is a difference between something named for a parallel/coordinate relationship between two people (for example, Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein) and something named for a single person who had a compound surname, which may be written with a hyphen or a space but not an en dash (for example, the Lennard-Jones potential [hyphen] is named after one person (Mr. John Lennard-Jones), as are Bence Jones proteins and Hughlings Jackson syndrome). This practice has continued despite the development of computer lettering.[42][43].
The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), however, limits the use of the en dash to two main purposes: That is, the CMOS favors hyphens in instances where some other guides suggest en dashes, the 16th edition explaining that "Chicago's sense of the en dash does not extend to between", to rule out its use in "US–Canadian relations". There is no need for them. They can also be used around parenthetical expressions – such as this one – in place of the em dashes preferred by some publishers,[30] particularly where short columns are used, since em dashes can look awkward at the end of a line. Otherwise, in Microsoft Office, click Insert, then Symbol, then the em dash. There is no matching closing quotation mark; typically a new paragraph will be started, introduced by a dash, for each turn in the dialog. You have entered an incorrect email address! The figure dash ‒ has the same width as a numerical digit; most fonts have digits of equal width. Mood: How to Use Tone and Mood in Your Writing, 5 Writing "Rules" That Are Really Guidelines, Beware of These Common Consistency Issues in Writing. I believe you are justified in worrying about how a symbol may appear online. To make your text look appealing, avoid using a hyphen at the end of the first line of text and the last full line. He is afraid of two things—spiders and senior prom. Here’s an example: Bill said, “I thought you were–” It uses hyphens for the situations above.

vs. AMA ", the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes: Correct Usage, "Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act", "Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes: When to Use Them and How to Type Them", "The Trouble With EM 'n EN (and Other Shady Characters)", "Em Dashes and Ellipses: Closed or Spaced Out? Dashes can also be used to show repetition of a word or phrase … This page was last edited on 10 November 2020, at 04:16. I have seen em dashes used at the end of written conversation where the speaker is interrupted. The dash (—) is a mark of punctuation used to set off a word or phrase after an independent clause or a parenthetical remark (words, phrases, or clauses that interrupt a sentence). Dashes are used to separate groups of words, not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. The 2015–2016 fiscal year was the most profitable year for the new business. Take my online self-study course Punctuation for Professionals. In Canada, The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, The Oxford Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling & Punctuation: Guide to Canadian English Usage (2nd ed. In Unicode, the figure dash is U+2012 (decimal 8210). The en dash is used to contrast values or illustrate a relationship between two things. For example, The Elements of Typographic Style by Canadian typographer Robert Bringhurst recommends the 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". Martha, thanks for the compliment. In such cases, its use is based purely on space considerations and is not necessarily related to other typographical concerns. Confession: After trying hard to create an en dash using HTML in this blog post, I gave up and used screen shots (pictures from Word docs) for my en dash examples above. "[52], For insertion of dashes using their Unicode code points (U+2013 for en dash and U+2014 for em dash), see, Common dashes and their Unicode code-points, Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level, Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of colon and em dash, Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of paired parenthetical marks, Approximating the em dash with two or three hyphens, Similar characters and their Unicode code-points, Similar characters used in specific writing systems, CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL SHORT HORIZONTAL STROKE, BALINESE MUSICAL SYMBOL LEFT-HAND OPEN PANG, In the Unicode Standard, the horizontal bar is also called "quotation dash" (see, Windows character codes must be typed using the numeric keypad with, Other style differences (e.g., APA "p.m." and "pp." Favourite answer. When a closing dash is not used, the sentence is ended with a period (full-stop) as usual. Copyeditors use dictionaries (general, medical, biographical, and geographical) to confirm the eponymity (and thus the styling) for specific terms, given that no one can know them all offhand. A dash is used to emphasise what follows. Thank you so very much for all the help your site is giving myself to aid my daughter's education at home. Understand how dashes are taught in the primary school grammar curriculum with our parents' guides to punctuation. It’s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Frequently seen written as a pair of hyphens, the em dash is a little longer than an en dash — roughly equivalent to the width of the lowercase m in the typeface in which it is set. the en-dash (–), which is the width of the letter "n", and the em-dash (—), which is the width of the letter "m". Paul, thanks for the reminder on the easy way to insert an en dash. Also use the en dash for the word to in expressions like these: For informal communication, you will typically use a hyphen rather than an en dash because the hyphen is faster to type.

Note that dashes are rather informal and should be used carefully in writing.

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