Posted on Jun 15, 2012 | Comments Off on Dash away, dash away, dash away all
Those little horizontal lines between words and numbers—em dashes, en dashes and hyphens—sure can cause a lot of confusion. They come in small (hyphen), medium (en dash) and large (em dash), but they don’t come with instructions. Consider this your cheat sheet.
Hyphen
En dash
Em dash
Now that you know which bit of punctuation to use, you should know how to type it. The hyphen has an established home on the keyboard, but not the em or en dash.
To type an em dash:
Windows: Alt + 151
Mac: Shift + Option + Minus
To type an en dash:
Windows: Alt + 150
Mac: Option + Minus
(Why are they called em and en, anyway? Because of the horizontal space occupied by the dash—the width of the letters m and n, respectively.)
Now, dash away!