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How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

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650 points Stratoscope | 8 comments | 27 Mar 25 20:19 UTC | HN request time: 1.855s | source | bottom
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mmooss ◴[27 Mar 25 23:41 UTC] No.43499567[source]▶
Here's an easy, if not always precise way to remember:

* Hyphens connect things, such as compound words: double-decker, cut-and-dried, 212-555-5555.

* EN dashes make a range between things: Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years: both connect not only the endpoints, but define that all the space between is included. (Compare the last usage with the phone number example under Hyphens.)

* EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts: 'What the—!'; A paragraph should express one idea—but rules are made to be broken.

Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens such as soft and non-breaking hyphens, and a dedicated minus sign (U+2212), and some variations of minus such as subscript, superscript, etc.

There's also the figure dash "‒" (U+2012), essentally a hyphen-minus that's the same width as numbers and used aesthetically for typsetting, afaik. And don't overlook two-em-dashes "⸺" and three-em-dashes "⸻" and horizontal bars "―", the latter used like quotation marks!

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lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 01:12 UTC] No.43500276[source]▶
> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts

Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes.

For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which makes using the dictionary very annoying.

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1. mmooss ◴[28 Mar 25 04:18 UTC] No.43501482[source]▶
The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism at least, says

  <word> <space> <dash> <space> <word>
Outside of journalism, usually there is no padding, only,

  <word> <dash> <word>
I'm with you: For searches, the spaces make the words easier to parse. Those rules predate computers, I would guess.
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2. lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 04:25 UTC] No.43501525[source]▶
> <word> <dash> <word>

That one I’d usually parse as a hyphen, as in e.g. well-known. “Word space dash space word” is much clearer, in my view.

> The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism

One of the things I can easily get away with by not being a US journalist :)

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3. mattl ◴[28 Mar 25 04:32 UTC] No.43501561[source]▶
Chicago Manual of Style has no spaces, so there’s some variation at least.
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4. mmooss ◴[28 Mar 25 05:07 UTC] No.43501741[source]▶
CMOS is not journalism, so it's not variation from the GP?
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5. mattl ◴[28 Mar 25 05:45 UTC] No.43501936{3}[source]▶
A wider number of people use either of them. Every place I’ve used used CMOS which I now use with others.
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6. stouset ◴[28 Mar 25 06:37 UTC] No.43502215[source]▶
It’s quite hard to mistake an em dash for a hyphen in a proportional font.

self-fulfilling

self—fulfilling

One of these looks very, very wrong.

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7. johnisgood ◴[28 Mar 25 06:42 UTC] No.43502255{3}[source]▶
I agree, although I still prefer spaces between —.
8. ghaff ◴[28 Mar 25 06:56 UTC] No.43502338{4}[source]▶
Company I used to work for used AP for things like press releases and, I think, official blog posts and Chicago plus a couple different tech style guides for everything else.

Basically, we didn’t like some things in AP but we wanted to make it easy for journalists to copy/paste.