The key on your keyboard types - U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, a compromise from typewriter days. Typography distinguishes several marks: the hyphen ‐ joins words; the – en dash marks ranges (pages 12–18) and connections (London–Paris); the — em dash sets off a break in a sentence; and the minus sign − belongs in arithmetic.
The rarer dashes each have a job. The figure dash ‒ has the width of a digit, so it lines up in phone numbers and tables. The horizontal bar ― introduces quoted dialogue in some languages. The two-em dash ⸺ stands for missing letters (Mr. S⸺) and the three-em dash ⸻ replaces a repeated author name in a bibliography. The soft hyphen U+00AD is invisible unless a line breaks at that point.
Click any symbol to copy it. Names link to the full character page with every encoding.