Know your dashes: the hyphen, en dash and em dash

What is an em dash? And when should you use one? And how is that different from a hyphen? And what's an en dash? It's all here for you to know your dashes.

OK, so you can get a little over the top about these, but I do notice when a hyphen is used to add a thought in text rather than the em dash, which is better made for it—and it's much nicer than using brackets or parentheses ().

And—to go the full mile—why not use an en dash when you’re separating your page numbers 1–5, or months May–Sep, next time?

Didn’t spot the difference? 

- hypen · short

– en dash · medium

— em dash · long

Most writing tools and Windows and Mac have tricks to do these automatically for you.

Updated from the original