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Em dash vs en dash vs hyphen
When to use which
| Character | When to use it | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| — Em Dash | Interrupting a sentence — an aside, an abrupt turn, or a closing clause you want to land harder than a comma would. | American style closes it tight against the words, British style prefers a spaced en dash. Two hyphens are a stand-in your software may or may not convert. |
| – En Dash | Spanning a range, or joining two things of equal weight: pages 10–24, 1939–45, a New York–London flight. | No spaces around it in a numeric range. It is not a substitute for a hyphen in a compound word. |
| ‐ Hyphen | Gluing words together and breaking them at the end of a line: well-known, self-employed, mother-in-law. | The key on your keyboard is not this character — it emits hyphen-minus, U+002D, which serves as hyphen and minus sign at once. |
Three horizontal strokes, three separate jobs, and a keyboard that offers exactly one key for all of them. That is the whole difficulty in a sentence: the rules are not subtle, but the shortest path from your fingers to the screen produces the same character every time, so the distinctions quietly collapse.
Length is the fastest tell on screen. The em dash is the long one, named for the "em" of metal type — the square of the point size being set. The en dash is about half that, historically the width of a lowercase "n". The hyphen is shorter still. But length is a consequence of the job, not the rule for choosing. Pick by what the mark is doing: interrupting a sentence, spanning a range, or binding two words into one.
The most common mistake in the set is a hyphen standing in for an en dash. "Pages 10-24" and "1939-45" are a hyphen doing a range's work, and once you have seen the difference it is hard to unsee in print. The same character has a second, quieter use that catches careful writers out: joining things of equal standing, as in a "New York–London flight," where a hyphen would suggest one hyphenated place name rather than two cities.
The em dash has no such rule to get wrong, only a convention to be consistent about. Spaced or unspaced is a house choice, not a correctness question, and the only real error is mixing both in one document. The related habit worth breaking is typing two hyphens and trusting the software: word processors usually convert "--" to a real em dash, plain text editors and code comments never do, and pasted text often carries the unconverted version along with it.
Underneath all of this sits a character none of the three actually is. The hyphen on your keyboard is hyphen-minus, U+002D, an ASCII compromise doing duty as hyphen, minus sign and dash substitute at once. For ordinary hyphenation nobody minds. For mathematics it matters — a proper minus sign matches the width and height of the digits and the plus sign beside it, which the keyboard hyphen does not. For columns of figures there is a figure dash, drawn to digit width so numbers stay aligned.
In practice you only need two shortcuts. On a Mac, Option and hyphen gives an en dash, adding Shift gives an em dash. On Windows, Alt+0150 and Alt+0151 do the same two jobs. In HTML, – and — are the entities, and each character's own page here has the rest of the encodings if you need them. Everything else you type as normal — including the hyphen, which is the one case where the keyboard's compromise is genuinely good enough.