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Two horizontal strokes of different lengths that do opposite jobs: one interrupts a sentence, the other joins two things.
The em dash is twice the width and breaks a sentence apart — like this. The en dash is half as wide and joins the ends of a range: 1914–18, the London–Edinburgh line. If the dash is separating a thought, it is an em; if it is standing in for the word 'to', it is an en. The one genuine complication is that British practice often uses a spaced en dash for the job American practice gives to a closed-up em, so the same sentence is correctly set two ways in two countries.
One is twice the width of the other and they do different jobs.
| Em dash | En dash | |
|---|---|---|
| Width | One em — as wide as the type size | One en — half an em |
| What it does | Interrupts: marks a break in thought or encloses an aside | Joins: a range, a route, a relation between two names |
| Reads as | A pause, roughly like a colon or a pair of brackets | The word 'to' |
| Spacing | Closed up in American practice | Closed up in a range; spaced when used parenthetically in British practice |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with En dash — One is twice the width of the other and they do different jobs. | Commonly confused with Em dash — One is twice the width of the other and they do different jobs. |
The forms and functions are not in dispute. Which dash to use parenthetically is a house-style difference between American and British publishing, and neither is an error.
University of Chicago Press · retrieved 2026-08-21
The principal American style authority. Prescriptive for American publishing; British practice under New Hart's Rules differs on spacing, dashes and quotation marks, and neither is an error.
Oxford University Press · retrieved 2026-08-21
The Oxford style reference and the standard British counterpart to Chicago. Cited for British convention where the two traditions diverge.
A hyphen joins parts of one word — well-known, re-enter. An en dash joins two separate things across a span — 1914–18, pages 34–36. The hyphen is noticeably shorter, and it is the one on the keyboard, which is why it stands in for everything. The practical test: if you could say 'to' instead, it should be an en dash.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.