En dash (–)

How to read it

Unicode encodes it as U+2013 EN DASH. The American Heritage Dictionary says it is named for the width of an n in printing; CMOS Shop Talk says it “gets its name from the letter N” and that it is also called an en rule. Chicago describes two jobs for it: a strong hyphen, linking numbers or words, and, in British usage, an ordinary sentence dash. It is longer than the hyphen and half the length of the em dash. Because keyboards have a hyphen key and no en dash key (Chicago), the hyphen often stands in for it, and Unicode notes that the keyboard hyphen-minus is “used generically for hyphen, minus sign or en dash”.

Also searched as: –, en dash meaning, en dash symbol, en dash vs em dash.

Ranges and links

Butterick’s Practical Typography gives the en dash two uses: a range of values (1880–1912, pages 330–39, Exhibits A–E) and a connection or contrast between pairs of words (Arizona–Nevada reciprocity, Sarbanes–Oxley Act). Butterick and the US Government Publishing Office’s Style Manual both keep “to” after “from”, as in “from 1880 to 1912”, rather than an en dash. In Chicago style it also joins an open compound, as in “pre–Civil War”. CMOS Shop Talk found a Zadie Smith sentence printed in The New Yorker with a hyphen, “faux-Louis XVI console”, and reprinted with an en dash in an anthology from Columbia University Press; The New Yorker, it says, “doesn’t normally do en dashes”.

Differences between style guides

The GPO Style Manual goes further than Chicago. It puts en dashes in telephone numbers (1–703–555–6593), Social Security numbers and names such as AFL–CIO and I–95, where Chicago separates the digits of a phone number or an ISBN with hyphens. The AP Stylebook has historically used no en dashes at all: its editor, Anna Jo Bratton, writes that they “didn’t translate correctly” to newspapers that received the wire by teletype. The Guardian’s sentence dashes are en dashes, spaced, as in its own example, where Chicago would use an em dash.

Look-alikes

The minus sign − (U+2212) looks almost the same, but CMOS Shop Talk notes that it is designed to line up with the horizontal stroke of a plus sign; Butterick accepts an en dash as a minus sign in spreadsheets. The figure dash ‒ (U+2012) is the width of a digit, for hyphenated numbers that need to line up in a column (Chicago). The em dash is twice as long.