Ok but being serious for a second, “-” is a “hyphen-minus”. It’s a symbol designed to be a compromise between a hyphen and a minus symbol, usable for both. But not a dash of any form. Hyphen is used for connecting words, similar to a compound word. Minus is used in maths.
The two types of dash are a little more interesting. There’s the em dash: “—”, is the width of a full “em”—basically, it’s the full maximum width of a single character in most typographical contexts. It’s usually used for parentheticals.
And there’s the en dash: “–”. Half the width of an em, and most often used for ranges, like saying “read pages 14–24”. It can also be used as a sort of “larger hyphen”, particularly when the thing being hyphenated contains a space. So you might say “prize-winning novelist” with a hyphen, but “Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist” uses an en-dash. En dashes can also take the place of “and”, “to”, or “through”, for example in sports scores (we won 14–12) or routes (the Sydney–Melbourne air corridor) and groupings (the Liberal–National Coalition).
Informally, a hyphen-minus often takes the place of an en dash in any of the above contexts, and you can use two consecutive hyphen-minuses to replace an em dash.
To date I’ve pretty much only used the long boy to identify people who use MS Outlook.
If I see the body of the email contains a hyphenated word using the extra wide hyphen I brace myself for a bit of winmail.dat attachments and other non compliant email hackory. Like reacts. Why are those a thing? 👍
Ok but being serious for a second, “-” is a “hyphen-minus”. It’s a symbol designed to be a compromise between a hyphen and a minus symbol, usable for both. But not a dash of any form. Hyphen is used for connecting words, similar to a compound word. Minus is used in maths.
The two types of dash are a little more interesting. There’s the em dash: “—”, is the width of a full “em”—basically, it’s the full maximum width of a single character in most typographical contexts. It’s usually used for parentheticals.
And there’s the en dash: “–”. Half the width of an em, and most often used for ranges, like saying “read pages 14–24”. It can also be used as a sort of “larger hyphen”, particularly when the thing being hyphenated contains a space. So you might say “prize-winning novelist” with a hyphen, but “Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist” uses an en-dash. En dashes can also take the place of “and”, “to”, or “through”, for example in sports scores (we won 14–12) or routes (the Sydney–Melbourne air corridor) and groupings (the Liberal–National Coalition).
Informally, a hyphen-minus often takes the place of an en dash in any of the above contexts, and you can use two consecutive hyphen-minuses to replace an em dash.
That’s actually very interesting.
To date I’ve pretty much only used the long boy to identify people who use MS Outlook.
If I see the body of the email contains a hyphenated word using the extra wide hyphen I brace myself for a bit of winmail.dat attachments and other non compliant email hackory. Like reacts. Why are those a thing? 👍
It’s not too hard to use proper dashes yourself, depending on platform.
On iOS and Android, they can be reached by long-pressing on the hyphen-minus key.
On Mac, option+hyphen-minus gives you en dash, and option+shift+hyphen-minus gives you em dash.
Windows is the worst, but if you have a numpad, alt+0151 (numbers must be on the numpad) gives you em-dash, and alt+0150 is en-dash.