Hyphens and Dashes: A Refresher - CMOS Shop Talk

Hyphens and Dashes: A Refresher - CMOS Shop Talk

The different types of dashes and hyphens and their appropriate uses, from the Chicago Manual of Style. There's the hyphen-minus you get when you press the key to the right of the 0, which is different from an en-dash - or an em-dash -- and is also different from a minus which is designed to align horizontally with the crossbar of a +. There are 2-em dashes used as a placeholder for illegible or expurgated text and 3-em dashes as a placeholder for a repeated author name in bibliographies. There's also a different Unicode hyphen character which looks the same as the hyphen-minus but doesn't match in text searches, a non-breaking hyphen, a figure dash (same width as a numeral in a fixed-width font), a horizontal bar, and a swung dash (a centered tilde that stands in for the headword in a dictionary entry, as different inflections of the word and idioms using that word are discussed.