The em dash, em rule, or mutton dash[4] — is longer than an en dash. Set off a sudden break in thought with a dash. In French, em or en dashes can be used as parentheses (brackets), but the use of a second dash as a closing parenthesis is optional. The hyphen-minus is usually too narrow to make a typographically acceptable minus sign.

Three em dashes one after another can be used in a footnote, endnote, or another form of bibliographic entry to indicate repetition of the same author's name as that of the previous work,[39] which is similar to the use of ibid. In consequence, it became common to substitute the nearest available punctuation mark or symbol. In the United Kingdom, the spaced en dash is the house style for certain major publishers, including the Penguin Group, the Cambridge University Press, and Routledge. Em dashes are often represented in British usage by a single hyphen-minus surrounded by spaces, or in American usage by two hyphen-minuses surrounded by spaces. 81–101). The Em Dash. Em dashes are also used to set off summaries or definitions. An em width is defined as the point size of the currently used font, since the M character is not always the width of the point size. "[52], For insertion of dashes using their Unicode code points (U+2013 for en dash and U+2014 for em dash), see, Parenthetic and other uses at the sentence level, Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of colon and em dash, Simple equivalence (or near-equivalence) of paired parenthetical marks, Approximating the em dash with two or three hyphens, Similar Unicode characters used in specific writing systems, CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL SHORT HORIZONTAL STROKE, BALINESE MUSICAL SYMBOL LEFT-HAND OPEN PANG, In the Unicode Standard, the horizontal bar is also called "quotation dash" (see, Windows character codes must be typed using the numeric keypad with, Other style differences (e.g., APA "p.m." and "pp." This can cause uneven spacing in the text, but can be mitigated by the use of thin spaces, hair spaces, or even zero-width spaces on the sides of the em dash.

Swung dashes appear almost exclusively in dictionaries. [37] It replaces other quotation marks, and was preferred by authors such as James Joyce:[38], The Walrus and the Carpenter For example, the APA style (named after the American Psychological Association) uses an en dash in ranges, but the AMA style (named after the American Medical Association) uses a hyphen: Some style guides (including the Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) and the AMA Manual of Style) recommend that, when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, the word "to" should be used instead of an en dash.

Introductory Defining Phrase Set off an introductory defining phrase with a dash. There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are: Less common are the two-em dash (⸺) and three-em dash (⸻), both added to Unicode with version 6.1 as U+2E3A and U+2E3B. Were walking close at hand; There is no matching closing quotation mark; typically a new paragraph will be started, introduced by a dash, for each turn in the dialog. When an em dash is unavailable in a particular character encoding environment—as in the ASCII character set—it has usually been approximated as a double (--) or triple (---) hyphen-minus.

Usually, you get an en dash (see below) with the option + hyphen key, and you get the larger em dash (used more frequently) with option + shift + hyphen keys.
Was someone playing “Baby Shark”? The dash is a punctuation mark that is similar in appearance to the hyphen and minus sign but differs from these symbols in length and, in some fonts, height above the baseline. It looks like this: If you’ve never seen a swung dash before, no worries.
In Unicode, the figure dash is U+2012 (decimal 8210). In these situations, en dashes must have a single space on each side. Such quantities of sand: We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe.If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly. Various style guides and national varieties of languages prescribe different guidance on dashes. Style guides outside the US are more variable.

This provides the appearance of an unspaced em dash, but allows the words and dashes to break between lines. They said, "it would be grand!". He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. .