What’s the Difference? En Dash vs. Em Dash
The Dilemma: You’re writing an important memo/term paper/mental_floss book, and you need a dash. But not just any dash.
People You Can Impress: Almost no one, really.The Quick Trick: It’s almost always an em dash. No document can ever contain too many em dashes.
The Explanation: An en dash (–) is bigger than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash (—). The names come from an obscure typographical measurement system, but the dashes have now taken on a life of their own in grammar. The em dash is the spork of English grammar: It ain’t particularly pretty, but you can use it for most anything. Em dashes can replace colons or sets of parentheses, or represent a sudden change in thought or tone.
But if the em dash is a spork, then the en dash is nothing less than a salad fork: We often forget what it looks like and when to use it. But here are the two basic uses of en dashes:
1. To show numerical ranges, signifying “up to and including”—of dates, ages, pages, etc. (Example: “I read pages 7–22 last night.”)
2. The storied “compound adjective hyphen,” an event so rare in the English language that proofreaders shiver with excitement whenever they come across it. Basically “pro-American” gets a regular hyphen because “American” is only one word, whereas “pro–Falkland Islands” gets an en dash because “Falkland Islands” is two words. So, too, phrases like “Civil War–era.”
