What's the Difference Between Em Dash, En Dash, and Hyphen?

October 2024 · 3 minute read

Quick Links

In the world of typography, a humble horizontal line can mean at least seven different things depending on its length and the context in which it gets used. Generally, the most confusing of these are the hyphen, en dash, and em dash. We'll explain the differences.

Em Dash vs. En Dash vs. Hyphen vs. Minus

As we mentioned above, each type of dash, hyphen, or minus sign has its own special length, and each also gets its own Unicode character. Let's take a look at how each one differs---and we'll also show you how to type them.

As if that weren't enough, there are other horizontal line Unicode characters, such as underscore (_), macron (¯), and overline (‾)---all of which can be used in different contexts to mean different things. Type is very complicated, and usually you don't need to worry about those. For the average person, you can often get by knowing just hyphen and em dash.

Related: How to Type an Em Dash on Windows or Mac

What's the Difference Between a Dash and Em Dash?

Even after all of that, you might still be confused: What about plain old "dash"? What is it, and how is it different than these other symbols? Well, it turns out that in the world of modern typography, a regular "dash" as a singular punctuation mark doesn't really exist. Instead, "dash" is a term that encompasses multiple punctuation marks like the en dash and em dash.

So informally, you can say "dash" and mean either en dash or em dash, but if you want to type a dash, you have to pick one of the specific types of dashes. Hope we haven't dashed your hopes! Good luck out there.

Related: What Are Character Encodings Like ANSI and Unicode, and How Do They Differ?

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qbvWraagnZWge6S7zGhvampgboFww8eaq6xlpJ2ybrDIn52eqpWjsKZ5wZ6rsJ2Vo3qmuYydmKygXZq7brDArJ9mmZ6ZeqnFz6Gcp2c%3D