The Right Dash for the Right Occasion
When to use a hyphen, en dash, and em dash.
Hyphens are the house dash.
On the shelf, easy to get to, and they go with almost anything.
Hyphens, the shortest of the dashes, are a workhorse punctuation mark that lets you turn separate elements into a single item for fast understanding that they are working as one. Here is what they pair well and not so well with:
Hyphens pair well with:
Compound adjectives: As in year-over-year returns, minute-by-minute reporting, or exceptionally well-written punctuation blog posts. (Notice, not after exceptionally. See “Where hyphens don’t belong” below.) If you are talking about a two- or three-week vacation, you can use suspensive hyphenation on the first word. Which I just demonstrated! If you’re not sure when to hyphenate health care, just make it one word and move on with your life. Healthcare.
Compound and proper compound nouns: A brother-in-law, step-niece, editor-in-chief, or mother-to-be. A mix-up or a break-in. Winston-Salem, Clacton-on-Sea, Daniel Day-Lewis, Toulouse-Lautrec.
Prefixes before proper names or numbers: mid-2010s, post-1850, pre-Columbian.
Words that would confuse or repeat letters:
>Co-op vs coop; re-cover (as in furniture) vs recover (get well or bring back)
>Build-up (noun) vs build up (verb/preposition);
>Re-elect and shell-like (not reelect or shelllike).
Creative expression: “My dog gave me his don’t-expect-me-to-eat-that-slop look as soon as he saw the kibble.”
Typesetting line breaks between syllables (but I never met a client who likes to see that.)
Hyphens DO NOT pair well with:
-ly adverbs: A wholly owned subsidiary, never a wholly-owned subsidiary. (Grammarly does not know this.)
Common phrases that are neither compound nouns nor adjectives:
>Correct: They met face to face, saw eye to eye, and walked off hand in hand.
>Correct: They held a face-to-face meeting, had an eye-to-eye confrontation, and the hand-to-hand combat began.
>Not correct: They met face-to-face, saw eye-to-eye, and walked off hand-in-hand.
Connoisseurs, copy editors, and the
Chicago Manual of Style choose the en dash to create relationships.
En dashes are longer than hyphens but shorter than em dashes. The Chicago Manual says the en dash “connects things that are related to each other by distance” and implies both physical and temporal distance.
A lot of writers don’t bother with the en dash. The Associated Press Stylebook does not use them. They are not on the keyboard, are hard to find, rarely taught in schools, and so are widely unknown. Consequently, large swaths of historic en-dash territory have been ceded to their shorter cousins. That’s likely fine in internal documents. But in formal usage — annual reports, press releases, websites, branded materials — there is a responsibility to get it right, AP be damned. The CMOS would no doubt approve of:
pages 10–20 (inclusive number range)
1995–2026 (range of years)
Monday–Friday (inclusive range of days)
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. (range of times)
2–3 hours (range of duration)
A 2–3-hour meeting (en dash for range; hyphen for the compound adjective)
There. That should cover everything most people would ever need or want to know about en dashes.
The em dash. Bold, full-bodied, and now ruined by lazy AIs.
I used to think AI’s overuse of em dashes was imitative. But according to Claude, it’s just laziness. It confessed, “…em dashes are structurally versatile — they can do the job of a comma, a colon, a parenthesis, or a period, all without committing to which relationship is intended.”
To clarify, I asked, “So basically, ‘Why make a decision when you can just use an em dash?’”
“That’s it exactly — that’s the internal (non-)logic in one line,” said the trillion-dollar, world-changing AI, lazily inserting an em dash where a human would have put a comma.
Leaving that AI shocker behind, em dashes basically say, “Make sure you’re paying attention — something important is coming up right after this em dash!” They heighten the drama just a bit, as in my example here. And in Claude’s attempted example above.
Use em dashes to:
Set off a mid-sentence aside that gives background info that’s not the point of the sentence. For example: The candidate — who was 21 and had never run for office — won in a landslide.
Could you have used commas instead? Maybe, but being 21 and a political newcomer adds drama that was worth elevating and gives “won in a landslide” more impact. Parentheses would have functioned, but they would have minimized the phrase instead of elevating it. And a lot of readers automatically ignore parentheses.
Em dashes have other convenient uses:
To emphasize a point: After a 5-hour meeting, we finally made a decision — no more 5-hour meetings!
Or a word: There was only one problem — money.
Or a dramatic pause: I thought they loved the dash blog — but then I saw the bounce rate.
And to avoid comma messes: The three finalists — Boston, Massachusetts; Portland, Maine; and Burlington, Vermont — were announced Friday.
And just to note, two hyphens do not an em dash make, no matter what it looks like on screen. Find a proper em dash (or en dash): Insert > Special Characters in Google Docs, with an easy search bar. In Microsoft: Insert > Symbol > More Symbols > Special Characters.
Also worth noting: Different publications handle the spacing around em dashes differently. The New York Times, Washington Post, and apnews.com all use spaces. Many writers feel it gives the text more room to breathe. The New Yorker magazine, with its three columns of tightly justified type, does not. Nor does the CMOS. If your organization uses AP or CMOS, use that guide’s style. If there is no guide, make a decision and be consistent.
Thanks for listening. Gotta dash.