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In many languages, a hyphen (-) is a single symbol, while a dash (--) is a double symbol. Dashes are primarily used by publishing experts, such as newspaper and book editors, as a substitute for a semi-colon (;) to get a more fluid feel of a text. To make matters more confusing, people typically call a hyphen (-) within a URL as "dash" when saying a URL out loud. Thus, www.hs-heilbronn.de would be pronounced "www DOT hs DASH heilbronn DOT de" because it is faster to say than "hyphen".

An example:

They can also be used around parenthetical statements–-such as this one-–in place of the em dashes preferred by some publishers, particularly where short columns are used, since em dashes can look awkward at the end of a line.

More detailed information: Dash in Wikipedia Hyphen in Wikipedia Minus in Wikipedia


In the tradition of European (and others) print there are several "horizontal line" characters used: each of them has different looks, meaning and purpose. Not all of them are used to this day, but the most common ones: minus sign (−), hyphen (‐), figure dash (‒), en-dash (–) and em-dash (—).

When the typewriters were intorduced, the technical limitations made every character on their keyboard scarce: thus the minus sign was butchered: made a little longer and lowered, to serve as a replacement for all the "horizontal line" characters. The new character was named "dash" or "minus/dash". Its exact meaning can be usually guessed from the context, but in cases where it mattered, various tricks were used to distinguish its various uses. When computers were created, they commonly uses teletype terminals -- and later more advanced teletype terminal emulators -- that all inherited the butchered typewriter character. With appearance of the desktop computers (Apple) and come back of proptional-width fonts, also the various "horizontal line" characters returned. Ubfortunately, there is no standard easy way of typing them on the used-to-be-teletype keyboard, and most users are not even aware of them.

The number of characters that these glyphs take depends on the encoding used -- they are always single glyphs though. Following the RFC-es for URLs, none of these characters is allowed in URL's unquoted -- instead the "dash/minus" glyph is commonly used.

The tricks used by the typists to distinguish hyphens from dashes include putting a space on both sides of the hyphen/minus character, using two or three hyphen/minus characters in a row (additionally distinguishing en-dash from em-dash), using tilde for separating ranges, etc. Modern typesetting software often adopts these techniques in order to ease the typing of these characters using standard keyboards. This, connected with the greater width of the dashes, can make some people believe that "dash" is a "double character" in some way.

Linking to a wikipedia article under some text that contradicts what is written there is pretty strange.

More links: Dash on Columbia Guide to Standrad American English, Hyphen on Columbia Guide to Standard American English, Dash on The King’s English, 2nd ed.

An interesting weirdness -- double hyphen

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« This particular version was published on 06-Mär-2007 16:06 by RadomirDopieralski.