What is the difference between Hyphen and Dash?

When writing or speaking, there are several ways by which we make or construct our sentences. Sometimes, we give some pauses in between our words or sentences so as to convey the write meaning to people. When it comes to reading and writing especially, the needed parameter which must be followed is the use punctuation marks. There are several kinds of punctuation marks, some are more frequently used than others, such as the full stop (.) and comma (,), while some are not really much in used.

This is probably because they have less usage in sentences, or people do not really know their uses. Examples of the rarely used ones which shall be discussed in this article are the hyphen and dash. Both hyphen and dash are similar in symbol, and they are both used to indicate a pause in sentences. Hyphen is two times longer than dash. Dash is used to indicate, and to also separate a group of numbers for easier reading; while hyphen is used to separate an appositive or independent clause, to form a compound word by joining words together.

A hyphen and dash may look similar to each other at first glance, but they are not the same. Their purposes are different from each other. A hyphen will have the ability to join two words together while the dash will make sure that two words will be separated from each other. Take note that the hyphen will not be interchangeable with the other dashes.

Another difference is that spaces should not separate the hyphen while dashes would need areas on both sides so that it will be considered correct. A dash can sometimes be used to indicate that the sentence should be read with a pause.

A hyphen is a punctuation mark. It is generally employed to join two separate words or parts of words together in order to avoid any form of confusion or ambiguity. The use of hyphens is referred to as hyphenation. On the other hand, a dash is longer than a hyphen. It is a horizontal line that expresses a pause or break in meaning.

Dashes are very informal and must be employed with much care. They are sometimes used instead of commas, colons and brackets. In fact there are two varieties of a dash, the en-dash and the em-dash. The en-dash is a shorter type of dash and requires spacing before and after. The em-dash is longer and must never have spaces before and after the point where it is employed. They hyphen normally appears at the end of a line to break up a whole word that won’t fit into the space. Both the hyphen and the dash can be confused so one must be careful.