What’s an En Dash? (And How to Use it Correctly)

Let’s get to know the en dash . An en dash is one of the special punctuation marks that most people see all the time, but rarely think about how to use correctly. Fun fact : the reason the en and em dashes have those names are because of their lengths. An em dash is about the length of the letter m, and an en dash (surprise) is the length of the letter n. Isn’t that fun? Now you have a conversation starter for cocktail parties. When to use an en dash The en dash is used when connecting ranges, and it replaces “to” in those ranges. You might have relatives aged 2–52, or a flight to catch from Austin–Detroit, or a baseball game that your team wins 4–2. In all of those circumstances, you would be using an en dash. How to create an en dash The en dash isn’t a key on your keyboard, so here’s a quick guide to help you type them correctly. If you are on a Mac or iOS device, press the option and the hyphen (-) key to create the en dash. In Windows, there are a few ways to do it. Microsoft Word will automatically replace a hyphen with an en dash if you add a space before and after it. If […]

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