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

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650 points Stratoscope | 7 comments | 27 Mar 25 20:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.582s | 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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rahimnathwani ◴[28 Mar 25 01:58 UTC] No.43500598[source]▶
I grew up in the UK, and have always used space, minus, space.

The first keyboard I used was my dad's typewriter, and I don't recall it having any 'dash' other that the minus sign.

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KPGv2 ◴[28 Mar 25 04:16 UTC] No.43501463[source]▶
space, minus, space is on the same level as manually typing two spaces after a period
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1. rahimnathwani ◴[28 Mar 25 04:35 UTC] No.43501579[source]▶
Until ~10 years ago, I used to type two spaces after a period.
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2. Daneel_ ◴[28 Mar 25 05:24 UTC] No.43501836[source]▶
I still do, and I maintain that it’s easier to read text with double spaces after periods.
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3. _emacsomancer_ ◴[28 Mar 25 08:08 UTC] No.43502768[source]▶
TeX puts more space after periods/fullstops (which is why you're supposed to do special markup or other measures to mark '.' in the middle of sentences which aren't sentence-enders (e.g. like e.g.)). But it's generally smaller than the equivalent of two manual spaces.

(A nice thing in (La)TeX is that one could follow the "two spaces after a full-stop" rule, which then has the advantage of being an explicit marking for sentence boundaries (which your editor might be able to navigate; Emacs has a convention of assuming two spaces after a sentence-ending '.'), but then the TeX typesetting will take care of making it look right. I lost the habit of actually doing this, for better or worse, except when flycheck/checkdoc/package-linter.el makes me do it for docstrings.)

4. globnomulous ◴[28 Mar 25 12:10 UTC] No.43504381[source]▶
I used to feel similarly. Now I find the double space a visual distraction that doesn't in any way improve readability.

The effect of the double space is, I suspect, a product of the reader's expectations: if you expect it, its absence creates mental work, detracting from readability; if you don't expect it, its presence is what creates mental work.

5. asveikau ◴[28 Mar 25 16:55 UTC] No.43507593[source]▶
I'm still doing it when I am typing at a physical keyboard. Hard habit to break. I learned it so long ago too.

You can tell when I've edited something on both a phone and a physical keyboard, based on the inconsistent use of spaces.

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6. rahimnathwani ◴[28 Mar 25 17:00 UTC] No.43507659[source]▶

  Hard habit to break. I learned it so long ago too.
Haha I learned to type organically, and it was only in my mid-40s that I retrained myself to type the correct way. It took something like 40 hours of practice on keybr.com before I could get close enough to my regular typing speed, such that I could switch over to the 'correct' method without it impacting my work.

Retraining myself to stop doing double-spaces took maybe a week.

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7. kevin_thibedeau ◴[28 Mar 25 18:40 UTC] No.43508675{3}[source]▶
Most word processors can be configured to flag double spaces. That gives feedback to break the habit.