We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
The commonest typographic slip in published English, and the two marks are distinguishable at a glance once you know to look.
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.
A hyphen joins parts of a word; an en dash joins the ends of a range.
| En dash | Hyphen | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Half an em — clearly longer | The shortest of the horizontal strokes |
| Joins | Two separate items: a range, a route, a pairing | Parts of a single word, or a word broken across a line |
| On the keyboard | No key — needs a character shortcut | Its own key, which is why it substitutes for everything |
| Substituting it | Rarely wrong to use where a hyphen belongs, because it is rarely done | Very common in a range, and the most frequent typographic error there is |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Hyphen — A hyphen joins parts of a word; an en dash joins the ends of a range. | Commonly confused with En dash — A hyphen joins parts of a word; an en dash joins the ends of a range. |
Unicode encodes the hyphen, the hyphen-minus, the en dash and the minus sign as four separate characters. The keyboard produces only the second, which is the mechanical cause of the confusion.
Unicode Standard — General Punctuation
The Unicode Consortium · retrieved 2026-08-21
Authoritative for a character's name, codepoint and identity as distinct from a lookalike. Deliberately silent on usage: Unicode encodes marks, it does not prescribe when to set them.
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.
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.
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.