The Three Different Kinds of Dash

In English, there are three dash-like punctuation marks: the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. Although these punctuation marks appear quite similar, each of them has a slightly different purpose.

The hyphen (-) is the shortest of the dashes. It has a number of different uses:

To connect the two parts of a word when one part of the word is on one line and the other part is on the next line. You don’t usually see this anymore since most word processors automatically adjust to avoid splitting...