He was eating pineapple pizza (–/-) gross! (–/-) when I last saw him.The heavy snows delayed the Denver (–/-) Chicago flight.Tomorrow is Halloween (–/-) my favorite holiday!.Look at each of the following sentences and see if you can figure out which dash should be used. Let’s see if you’ve learned the difference with a few examples. Em dash: Can replace commas, parentheses, colons, and semicolons.En dash: Expresses ranges, relationships, and is used in some compound words.Summing up what has been mentioned already, these are the jobs of the two different dashes: Semicolon: The mirror confirmed what she had always known to be true -she was a vampire.Īlthough their names are very similar, en dashes and em dashes cannot be used interchangeably.Colon: They opened the door and found the intruder -a zombie!.Parentheses: Kevin -that heartless scoundrel!-refused to pet the kitten.Commas: Alexander the Great -a king among kings-led a nearly unstoppable army.The following examples show em dashes swapping in for other punctuation marks. Most writers use em dashes for stylistic reasons the em dash is a particularly striking character, so a writer will often use one to draw a reader’s attention. In general, the em dash is seen as being more informal than these other punctuation marks. Rather than have its own unique uses, it typically takes the place of certain other punctuation marks: namely commas, parentheses, colons, and semicolons. The em dash is an interesting punctuation mark. Like the en dash, you usually need to insert it as a special character because it doesn’t appear on most keyboards. The em dash is the longest of the three dashes. He was a collector of South Korea–style artwork.They drove across the Spain–Portugal border.We took the Monday–Friday bus to the airport.Barack Obama ( 2009–2017) was America’s 44th president.The following examples show the different ways we can use en dashes: She was an expert in World War II–era literature.Most keyboards don’t have a key to type an en dash, and you’ll usually need to insert it as a special character.Įn dashes have several different common uses. En dashes are used to represent ranges, especially ranges of numbers:Įn dashes are also used to indicate a close relationship between two things:įinally, en dashes are sometimes used in complex compound words, such as a compound word that includes a proper noun with spaces in it: The en dash is slightly longer than a hyphen. My daughter’s favorite ride is the merry-go-round.During the war, the government produced anti-American propaganda.There are twenty-six birds in that tree.Our baseball team has three left-handed batters.The following examples show how we typically use hyphens to make compound words: The hyphen indicates that a single word has been split apart so that a reader isn’t confused by chopped up words. Sometimes, hyphens are also used to signal line breaks in certain types of writing. There are a few different rules regarding using hyphens to form compound words, which you can learn more about in our detailed coverage of hyphens. For example, jack-in-the-box is an actual word whereas “jackinthebox” is not. Many compound words need a hyphen, or they are considered grammatical mistakes. The hyphen is the dash that writers are likely most familiar with because it has a very common usage: compound words. These are the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash. In writing, there are three different punctuation marks that most people refer to as dashes. We are going to change that and give each of these dashing punctuation marks a chance to show us how useful they are. Considering that the pipe symbol- the what?-makes it onto the keyboard, the other dashes clearly don’t get enough respect. After all, the hyphen is the only dash that makes it onto most keyboards. This may come as a surprise to many as the hyphen tends to dominate the spotlight. In writing, we use three different types of dashes: the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash.
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