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The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline.The most common versions are the en dash –, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash —, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar —, whose length varies ...
The en-dash is also increasingly used to replace the long dash ("—", also called an em dash or em rule). When using it to replace a long dash, spaces are needed either side of it – like so. This is standard practice in the German language, where the hyphen is the only dash without spaces on either side (line breaks are not spaces per se).
Wikipedia uses four: the hyphen (sometimes called the hyphen-minus), the minus sign, the en dash, and the em dash. Hyphen (- or -, MOS:HYPHEN; known as the hyphen-minus in ASCII and Unicode) are used in many ways on Wikipedia. They are the only short, horizontal dash-like character available as a separate key on most keyboards. They are used:
Dash, Hyphen-minus-Hyphen-minus: Dash, Hyphen, Minus sign ☞ Index: Manicule, Obelus (medieval usage) · Interpunct: Full-stop, Period, Decimal separator, Dot operator ‽ Interrobang (combined 'Question mark' and 'Exclamation mark') Inverted question and exclamation marks ¡ Inverted exclamation mark: Exclamation mark, Interrobang ¿ Inverted ...
For example, an en dash is entered using ⌥ Opt+-; an em dash (—) is entered using ⇧ Shift+ ⌥ Opt+-. Also on a Macintosh pressing and holding certain letters (the vowels and a few other letters) brings up a pop-up menu of related special characters, such as accented versions of vowels, which can be clicked on or selected numerically.
Some OEM DOS computers supported other character sets, for example the Hewlett-Packard HP 110 / HP Portable and HP 110 Plus / HP Portable Plus, where in a modified version of the character set box-drawing characters were added in reserved areas of their normal HP Roman-8 character set.
To insert a dash or minus sign, use the toolbar below the edit box. Click where you want the character to be inserted, select "Insert" from the pull-down menu, and then: To insert an en dash (–), click on the first character (the shorter dash). To insert an em dash (—), click on the second character (the longer dash).
The space before a spaced dash should preferably be a non-breaking space ( ). Em dashes are not spaced. Dashes have the following uses: Unspaced em dashes or spaced en dashes are used to indicate interruption in a sentence. In this use, on any one page, either use unspaced em dashes consistently, or use spaced en dashes consistently.