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The short stroke that joins parts of one word.
Also known as: Short dash, Little line between words
The shortest of the horizontal strokes and the only one on a standard keyboard, which is why it stands in for all the others. It joins within a word; it does not span a range and it is not a minus sign.
A short horizontal stroke joining the parts of a compound word, marking a word broken across a line, or attaching a prefix.
The keyboard key produces the hyphen-minus, a single character that stands in for the true hyphen, the minus sign and both dashes. Unicode encodes all four separately, and software that sorts, searches or does arithmetic treats them differently.
A minus sign typed as a hyphen looks nearly right and will not align in a column of figures.
Whether a given compound takes one at all is the least settled question in English style, and dictionaries disagree with each other and with themselves across editions.
A very short horizontal stroke set on the mid-line between two characters.
A hyphen joins parts of a word; an en dash joins the ends of a range.