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Everything you need to know about hyphens - and dashes: endashes – and emdashes — in one easy lesson.
Hyphens are used in many ways on Misplaced Pages. They are the only short, horizontal dashlike character available on most keyboards, and are used as hyphens, minus signs, and dashes; both endash and emdash. For clarity, negative numbers are entered using an endash in newspapers, instead of a minus sign or a hyphen. This is not done in Misplaced Pages. Normally a hyphen is used for a minus sign, other than in math formulas, where it is styled as an endash or emdash.
In hyphenated names, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a hyphen is used, as is the case in many other proper nouns, such as Mexican-American War, and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. This follows common usage, per WP:TITLE. A small number of publications use an endash in some proper nouns, but the predominant style used, and that used by Misplaced Pages, is a hyphen.
There are actually eight different horizontal dashlike characters of varying lengths that can be used on the Internet. Misplaced Pages only uses four, the hyphen, the minus sign, the endash, and the emdash. As the hyphen is the only one that can be easily entered from the keyboard, it is almost ubiquitously used, and can safely be substituted for an endash, and with spaces for an emdash.
- - is a hyphen-minus (ASCII keyboard or 002D) -
- ‐ is a hyphen (2010)
- ⁃ is a hyphen bullet (2043)—it's probably not a good idea to use hyphen bullets for a list such as this one!
- − is a minus (2212)—this can also be entered from the Insert bar, it's between the ± and × (in my browser, it looks more like an en dash than a hyphen, go figure!)
- ‒ is a figure dash (2012)
- – is an en dash (2013)
- — is an em dash (2014)
- ― is a horizontal bar (2015)
Endashes are slightly longer than hyphens and are used in date ranges and to join two names in a phrase, such as 1849–63, or the Michelson–Morley experiment, or to separate phrases – in a sentence. They are not used, though, in proper nouns, such as the comet Hale-Bopp, discovered by Hale and Bopp, or the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, between Richmond and San Rafael.
Emdashes are even longer, and are used to set aside a phrase—like this—in a sentence. They are not considered good writing, but can be used. A spaced hyphen can be used - like this - instead of an emdash.
Minus signs are also available, for negative numbers, such as −4, but hyphens can be ubiquitously used instead. In fact, hyphens can be used for all of the above, and if there is one one a page, need not be corrected unless the page reaches FA or FAC status. If there are two, and one is correctly used as an endash or emdash and the other a hyphen where an endash or emdash is correct, the hyphen should be changed to the correct punctuation. If there are more than two then they should be changed to be either all hyphens or all correct, whichever anyone chooses, but if they are all hyphens, no change should be made until the page reaches FA or FAC status, because there are far more important changes to make to a GA page than to change a hyphen or two to an endash or emdash.