dash
Sign in to saveThe 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 endash , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the emdash , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontalbar , whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.
AI overview
The dash is a punctuation mark that appears as a long horizontal line, similar to a hyphen but longer and sometimes positioned higher on the line. It comes in several versions—the en dash, em dash, and horizontal bar—each varying in length, and these different dashes serve distinct purposes in writing and typography.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Punctuation mark.mark
- —
- Punctuation mark.variant1
- ‒
- Punctuation mark.caption1
- Figure dash
- Punctuation mark.variant2
- –
- Punctuation mark.caption2
- En dash
- Punctuation mark.variant3
- —
- Punctuation mark.caption3
- Em dash
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
46 sectionsContents
- History
- Types of dash
- Figure dash
- En dash
- Usage
- Ranges of values
- Relationships and connections
- Attributive compounds
- Differing recommendations
- Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level
- Typography
- Spacing
- <span class="anchor" id="Encoding, substitution, and keyboard shortcuts"></span>Encoding and substitution
- Itemization mark
- Em dash
- Usage
- Colon-like use
- Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of colon and em dash
- Inversion of the function of a colon
- Parenthesis-like use
- Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of paired parenthetical marks
- Subtle differences in punctuation
- Interruption of a speaker
- Interruption by someone else
- Self-interruption
- Quotation
- Quotation mark–like use
- Attribution of quote source
- Redaction
- Itemization mark
- Repetition
- Typographic details
- Spacing and substitution
- Approximating the em dash with two or three hyphens
- Usage in AI-generated text
- Horizontal bar<!-- This section is linked from [[Horizontal bar]] -->
- Swung dash<!-- This section is linked from Dash -->
- Typing the characters
- Unicode
- Unicode dash characters
- Related characters
- In other languages
- See also
- Explanatory notes
- References
- External links
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 endash , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the emdash , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontalbar , whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.
Typical uses of dashes are to mark a break in a sentence, to set off an explanatory remark—similar to parentheses—or to show spans of time or ranges of values.