![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 |
== Can someone clarify whether the en dash consists of one or two lines, and edit the article to make this clear? At present it indicates that the en dash is half the length of the em dash, but this does not appear to be the case if the en dash consists of two lines. Instead it appears that the individual lines are half the length, but that when put together as a pair, they look a similar length to the em dash. Christidy ( talk) 19:51, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I now think that perhaps I have a font problem with my browser. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.3 for Solaris SPARC. When I visit the "Dash" page, the en dash shows up as --. Also, when I view biographies, dates of birth and death are separated by --. Can anyone tell me if they see the same thing? Many thanks.
Christidy (
talk)
20:03, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I feel very strongly that the article should mention that a double-hyphen--when used as a dash--tends to look ugly. — Frungi 5 July 2005 03:29 (UTC)
According to the article, the figure dash (‒) is the same as the minus sign (−), but they are not the same.
1+2−3 not equal to 1+2‒3
Another example:
−‒−‒− ‒ − ‒ − ‒
In my font at least, they are not the same height or width, and only the minus sign corresponds to the plus sign.
Hyphen:
+-=-
-+-=
=====
-----
Minus sign:
+−=−
−+−=
=====
−−−−−
Figure Dash:
+‒=‒
‒+‒=
=====
‒‒‒‒‒
-
Omegatron 21:13, Mar 16, 2004 (UTC)
Copied here and expanded:
634‒5789 is from the Steve Cropper/ Eddie Floyd song of the same title originally recorded by Wilson Pickett in 1966, which also appeared in the Blues Brothers 2000 movie. Most phone companies world-wide refuse to give out the number, because for the past few decades since the song appeared on air it's being called many times daily. It has been covered by Jon Bon Jovi, Tina Turner, and many other artists. — Jor (Darkelf) 22:53, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
this is really strange -- I keep hitting an edit link for "Dash usage question", the last one on the page, twice now, and I get the "== The phone number ==" section, not the section I am trying to mess with. By any chance is the excess spacing between the equals causing trouble? This unsigned msg is older than 22:35, 8 May 2005; most editors will not want to waste their time on it. -- Jerzy• t 21:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
When does one use the comma, and when does one use a dash (and of what type)? In fact, where are parenthesis more appropriate?
I guess these questions are directed as regards British usage – or more particularly, Hiberno–english practice – seeing as I'm in Ireland!
Zoney 15:51, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
It seems that the em dash and the semi colon are similar to each other, in that they both are stronger than a comma, but less than a period. From the usage I have seen, the em dash seems closer to a comma, and a semicolon seems closer to a period. Am I correct in this? Should this be added to the article? Thanks, -- Pordaria 19:05, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
In the article 16th century is this phrase "that century which lasted from 1501-1600"
As I see it, if you are going to use from then you should use to instead of a dash (of whatever variety). ;Bear 23:06, 2004 Apr 14 (UTC)
To quote Wikipedia's own Semantic progression article:
Which dash should be used in this case? Seems like an em dash is called for (or you could replace the dash with a simple comma), but no fitting example is given in the Dash article. -- Itai 22:21, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)
CMS ed. 15, 6.88, "An em dash or a pair of em dashes sets off an amplifying or explanatory element." This seems to be described in the article as a parenthetical phrase. - Nunh-huh 22:29, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Under en dash it states:
Under em dash it states:
In a face where the "N" is not half the width of the "M", which definition wins? Jake 20:11, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Both here and in linked articles (em dash, en dash) there's the frequent assertion that en = 1/2 em, which is emphatically not true, as can be demonstrated by experimentation with different fonts. As a generalization, em spaces and em dashes are usually designed to be equal to the point size of the font, so that 1 em equals 12 points in a 12 pt. font. Also as a generalization, en spaces and dashes are designed to be equal to the width of numerals, so that as an expedient, tables can be aligned without the use of tabs. This deserves more research, but empirically, 1 en = 2/3 em might be in the right ballpark. Philosophy of the type designer or type house seems to come into play: for instance, some em and/or en dashes appear to incorporate a small amount of white space to the left and right of the character; some don't. Some fonts do appear to use 1 en = 1/2 em, but if ever that was an inflexible rule, I doubt it extended much beyond 1900. Display faces (i.e. those designed for brief passages of text, in advertising or decorative uses), and condensed faces, tend to jettison such rules. If for instance a condensed face were to use em dashes equal to the point size, the dashes would then be the same length as that in the uncondensed version of the font, and therefore felt as disproportionate by the reader. Paulownia5 20:25, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
Google says both:
So traditionally em was the width of an M, and in modern digitized fonts it is the point size of the font. Whether the en is half or N sized, I don't know. - Omegatron 21:49, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Despite all the suggestions to the contrary in the article, Safari 1.2 on 10.3.4 displays every single one of the dashes correctly. This can be verified by dragging-and-dropping each of them into the "Favorites" section of the Character Palette and then selecting them. The "Character Info" section at the bottom of the palette will then tell you what Unicode character you're looking at (e.g. "horizontal bar" or "em dash"), and for all of the examples in the article it reports the correct one.
By the way, this is also true for all of the spaces listed in the spaces article except for the Ogham space and the medium mathematical space.
Now, many/most of these kinds of characters (glyphs?) appear in only a few fonts--often just the system's default (Lucida Grande) or, at best, Big Caslon and some of the CJK fonts with a gazillion characters. I'm guessing that Safari is just using whichever font it can find to display the characters, which most of the time is probably Lucida Grande.
FWIW.
--anonymous WP newbie
Though we, and every serious written material, should make the correct usage of dashes I really don't think most people know that there are different types, let alone use them. Perhaps there should be a mention made that these rules are very formal and most people ignore them anyway? violet/riga 16:52, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
50–60% or 50%–60%
50–100 W or 50 W–100 W
- Omegatron 01:01, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
Or is it simply an example in which "to" should be used instead? - Omegatron 20:17, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
Although I eliminated the self-reference, currently this article reads like "A Wikipedia editor's guide to dashes", with a very strong focus on their use in web pages, rather than an overview of dashes in general. In particular, nothing of their history is mentioned. While I don't doubt the general applicability of the material to all web pages, we could do with a lot more information on dashes. Derrick Coetzee 01:48, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The first line or the article reads:
The next thing to appear is this table:
glyph | Unicode | HTML | |
---|---|---|---|
dash (hyphen) | - | ASCII 45 0x2D | |
figure dash | ‒ | U+2012 | |
en dash | – | U+2013 | – |
em dash | — | U+2014 | — |
quotation dash | ― | U+2015 | |
swung dash | ⁓ | U+2053 |
So is it a hyphen, or isn't it? - Vague | Rant 05:42, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)
Other style guides I've checked seem to agree with that. Where then does this (wrong?) use of the em dash come from? Is it confusion with another dash? Jordi· ✆ 03:55, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Thank you so much for these articles and the judicious redirects. — Peter Hitchmough
Should the wave dash be listed as a dash? Thoughts and comments please.
Can someone give an example of usage for —.
The initial definitions of en- and em-dashes use the
unicode template, and look different (at least, in
IE) from actual uses of &ndash
and &mdash
. I assume the unicode template is correct - so the article should at least use it consistently.
The corollary of this is that whenever you want to make an en- or em-dash in Wikipedia, you should not use the HTML entity, but instead the unicode template or a copy-paste...? ··gracefool | ☺ 03:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
This page needs to mention the use of long dashes in bibliographies. ― BenFrantzDale 07:24, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
On the public computer that I am using, the swung dash is not correctly depicted. It appears as a skinny vertical rectangle.
The text says that a math-mode command $\sim$ should be used in LaTeX for the swung dash. However, the use of a math mode command for a text mode symbol because it 'looks right' is bad TeX. My immediate thought for the text-mode equivalent is \textasciitilde, but that's too short. JadeNB 19:03, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Svyatoslav ( talk) 04:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with this use of en dashes. It would be nice to have a reference for further reading. (What I have read recommends not using hyphens in compound adjectives.) Eric 11:18, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
I've also seen and used this. It's equivalent to the semicolon replacing the comma in long clauses. — DIV ( 128.250.204.118 02:21, 20 July 2007 (UTC))
Which dash (if any) is to be used in a date, e.g., 2006-02-23? — Chris Page 01:34, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
Dashes are very commonly used in lists to separate a term from its definition (or similarly related pieces of information), like this:
My question is, which dashes are appropriate for such lists? — mjb 00:52, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
The "Summary" section has a prescriptive tone - which is undesirable and at odds with the rest of the article - and is directed at the reader. It would be easy to change it to the passive voice, eg "... the figure dash is used", but I'm not sure this is best either. Nurg 23:17, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
What sources support using an em dash in open ranges? For open ranges that are years specifically, CMS 14 rule 5.115 requires an en dash. I can't find any comment on other types of numbers in CMS. — Naddy 15:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
So what dash do you use if a word doesn't fit on a line, and is cut in half by a dash in-
between syllables?
Mrdebeuker
21:47, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
Of course 'in between' is two words, not one, so that hyphen doesn't belong (although the question itself is still valid). JadeNB 19:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Can we please not use the text itself as an example for the text itself? Set examples of typography apart from the text in their own boxes, so they can be compared, aren't changed by editors who don't understand them, are clear to people who have never encountered them before or don't speak the language, etc.
Or — something like this
Or—something like this
See also Wikipedia_talk:Avoid_self-references#Self-referential_content. — Omegatron 16:41, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
In editing the subsection on the en dash I found one occurrence of hyphen–minus, and elsewhere hyphen-minus (with a hyphen, not an en dash). There are arguments for each form: if hyphen modifies minus, a hyphen would be used, by the criteria in the article itself; but if the entity is as much a hyphen as it is a minus, so that it could equally have been called minus–hyphen, then arguably the en dash is called for. I changed things to the form with the en dash in the subsection I edited; but the whole article should be consistent in this (especially when one considers that its topic is dashes). So which form is better? Personally, I don't care very much. I just strive for consistency – especially consistency within a whole article. Noetica 00:23, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Wouldn't it make more sense to render that as "high-priority, high-pressure tasks"? If a task is both, say, urgent and difficult, you wouldn't call it an "urgent-difficult task", you'd call it an "urgent, difficult task". I can't think of a context where one would naturally compound the two adjectives "high-priority" and "high-pressure".
Looking at the following two lines, the first clearly is using dashes, while the second clearly has hyphens. Yet if you click on "edit this article", they look exactly the same in the edit box. What's going on here?
time–of–flight
time-of-flight
Flarity 21:39, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
So why is the edit page font different from the regular font? Flarity 06:34, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
This article mentions the dash being used as a method of quotation when writing conversation. It directs the reader to the "quotation dash section" of the Quotation Mark article, but such a section does not exist. How dashes are supposed to be used in the place of quotation marks remains a mystery, based on how the articles currently stand. 69.64.3.12 15:23, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Derek (Better late than never). In some languages, e.g., French and Hungarian, conversations are often rendered thus:
These are considered quotations from the speakers. kovesp ( talk) 00:36, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
From the article, "They can also be used around parenthetical statements – such as this one – in place of the em dashes preferred by some publishers..."
That, I daresay, is the most absolutely fucking brilliant thing I think I have ever read on Wikipedia. My intense respect to whoever contributed that.
69.113.219.44—The preceding signed but undated comment was added at 07:20, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
According to the article, the en dash can be used as “a connection between two things of almost any kind….” It then goes on to list some examples that fit this definition:
I was not aware this was proper usage of the en dash. As I understand it, in all five of those cases, the hyphen is appropriate. This usage should be verified and cited (if it is indeed proper).— Kbolino 11:49, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I've added a FACT tag to the relevant sentence in this article. I have seen the en dash used for "Foo-Bar Theorem" in one and only one place: other wikipedia articles. I assume this practice did start elsewhere but it does seem a little unlikely that the article text claiming that it is more common than the hyphen for this practice is correct. Quietbritishjim ( talk) 17:05, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
Dicklyon, you removed this text:
Some argue that the unspaced em dash risks introducing exaggerated spacing, in full justification.
Your edit summary:
given the confusion, let's just omit the weasel words; if there's a source for who thinks what about this, we can add it
What confusion, in the section in question? For sentence-level punctuation, some publishers prefer em dashes (spaced or not), and some prefer spaced en dashes. And they have their various reasons. The words you struck out were not weasel words. (Look at that article's definition; Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_words does not respect that definition, by the way.) If you think that the text needs a citation, then say that: don't just delete it. The sentence simply attempts to give one reason for publisher's choices, and is perfectly comprehensible. Comprehensible, but wrong! In fact the sentence was originally about the spaced em dash. I'll now restore it to say what it originally said, and expand it.
The spaced em dash risks introducing excessive separation of words: it is already long, and the spaces increase the separation. In full justification, the adjacent spaces may be stretched, and the separation of words is further exaggerated.
Anomalocaris, you have now seen to it that the article has a dozen references to The Chicago Manual of Style, hugely outnumbering appeals to all other authorities. The article is therefore biased against other established practice, especially practice outside of America. I may well apply a marker disputing its neutrality, for that reason. Please respect NPOV. I'll try to find time to restore some balance. – Noetica♬♩ Talk 23:44, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
In some compositional styles farther from Chicago :-) , such as in Portuguese, the em dash must be enclosed with spaces, unless followed by a comma. I am now using Openoffice.org Writer and have difficulty in producing em dashes (maybe just temporary ignorance); the PC keyboard combination Alt-0515 seems to produce something that looks like it, though too similar to an en dash. Some word processors do have a key combination for it.
Also, though the soft hyphen is mentioned, there is no mention to the hard hyphen, a hyphen that is present wether hyphenation occurs or not (that's not the same as the regular hyphen!), and can be combined with a soft hyphen to produce the correct hyphenation of portuguese hyphenated words ( WordPerfect had it, Word, AFAIK, never had.) For instance,
"entendamo-nos" is expected to be hyphenated on a line break to "entendamo- -nos" not "entendamo- nos"
That required a soft hyphen followed by a hard hyphen. Most current word processors do not produce the correct hyphenation for portuguese and do not allow it to be produced either. Portuguese is the sixth or seventh most spoken language in the world though, when it comes to buying word processors, it must be far down the list. Xyzt1234 18:23, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Regarding my removed comments about the 'The Elements of Typographic Style' Applied to the Web, the Trebuchet MS font (which I use exclusively) en dash (–) and em dash (—) are much shorter than in Times New Roman (–) and em dash (—). Hence, using en dashes in this font is essentially useless since it looks only barely longer than a hyphen/minus sign (-). However, the figure dash (‒) is longer than the en dash. Font differences need to be explicitly pointed out in this article--and why not everyone agrees to the use of specific dashes (en, em, figure, whatever!) related to font differences. ∞ ΣɛÞ² ( τ| c) 10:36, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
For example in any sport, where two teams have the same amount of points in the standings, the use a dash (I'm not sure which) for the second one in place of a position number, which dash would be used in that case? Bsroiaadn Talk 22:04, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Standard for years is 2001 - 03. 2001 ‐ 03. Londo06 15:11, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The usage of the em-dash is different in different countries. In Poland we have many long dashes and they have spaces around. Some kind of long dashes, whether em-dashes or another kind of simmilar length, is also used to separate dialogs in prose:
-- How are you? -- I asked him.
-- I am -- he said with some hesitation -- fine.
In German books I read there were single quotes and commas:
'I am', he said, 'fine'.
When using em-dashes for dialogs, one can not embed a pause into the characters words, but instead an ellipsis could be placed:
-- I am... fine.
Em-dashes are acceptable in plays (drama):
HAMLET
To be -- or -- not to -- be...
Because there is no narration -- a drama is simply a long dialog with some comments.
When it comes to aesthetics -- most people probably prefer what they are used to. It is simmilar to source code indentation wars, however, when already consistently used, some styles may be supreme to others. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.17.205.182 ( talk) 13:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Something I'd like to see in the article is info about what kind of dashes are appropriate for sports scores and win-loss records. For example, The Colorado Rockies beat the San Diego Padres 9-8 to finish the regular season with a record of 90-73. — mjb 23:32, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
"The em dash is used in much the way a colon or set of parentheses is used: it can show an abrupt change in thought or be used where a full stop (or "period") is too strong and a comma too weak." Shouldn't colon (:) be replaced by semicolon (;) in that sentence? My understanding is that semicolons indicate a separation of line of thought; colons indicate an expansion: consequence, description, clarification, etc.
Another issue: "Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables [variable spacing] for the words between which it falls." Isn't that also true of the slash (/)? Ayla ( talk) 23:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
I wish to suggest that we add a Cleanup request on the Dash page. The entire page seems very unorganized, and many parts can be joined together. What do you think?
Lelandrb ( talk) 23:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
I wonder whether it is common in English to use a dash in the case of a non-parenthetical apposition or relative clause – which would call for an example in the article then. -- Quilbert ( talk) 15:19, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Which dash style should be used in chemical formulas? This isn't listed here or on the chemical formula page. I have text with items such as "-COOH". Wakablogger2 ( talk) 03:04, 4 May 2008 (UTC)Wakablogger2
I removed this phrase because it is not encyclopedic. Wikipedia is not a style guide. I'm not debating the merit of it, however the statement as it is currently written is not verifiable since it is a prescription. It is not an encyclopedia's place to tell readers what "the important thing" is. – flamurai ( t) 05:00, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
"...Chinese character which means one in both Chinese and Japanese." I suggest renaming the first "Chinese" to "Hanzi". Benlisquare ( talk) 11:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Many popular media players use the “⟨Artist⟩ - ⟨Song⟩” format, as in “The Beatles - Yesterday”. Does anybody know who invented that and whether there is any agreement as to the separator character? 78.110.162.163 ( talk) 10:58, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Hey the paget is currently blocked, however could someone add the latex formatting from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Formatting ? basically it says that hyphen = - en dash = -- em dash = --- minus = $-$ *** —Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.232.144.109 ( talk) 02:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
I haven't managed to get the Ctrl–Numberic Hyphen or Ctrl–Alt–Numeric Hyphen to work on Windows Vista. I have to access the numpad via a function key on my laptop keyboard, so maybe that messes with it. But is anyone sure it works? Tophtucker ( talk) 04:35, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
I was wondering why we claimed the en dash is half the width of the em dash, so I did a book search, and sure enough there are quite a few books that say so; on the other hand, it is demonstrably incorrect in most modern fonts and books. What's going on here? Dicklyon ( talk) 15:58, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
More recent sources say that the en and em dash lengths are not standard or related to letter widths (in all typefaces, although they may be in some): [5]. Tijfo098 ( talk) 14:42, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm seeing a formatting problem, not just here but elsewhere.
In the "En-dash" section, where it says "recommends that the word to be used", the underlying source code clearly shows that the word "to" should be italicised, making a clear and grammatically correct sentence. However — on my system at least (Mac OS 10.4.11) — it doesn't appear italicised, making nonsense of the sentence: that is, coding like this no longer appears to make words appear in italics in the main article. This has been the case for a few months. Paul Magnussen ( talk) 15:22, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
In Victorian novels, a long dash is sometimes used in the same way an asterisk can be, to hide part of a taboo word, for instance 'D——' instead of 'Damn'. Also, in dates in such novels, it often says 18—— instead of, say, 1848. Why is that? -- 193.128.72.68 ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:59, 21 August 2009 (UTC).
[...]often demarcates a parenthetical thought—like this one—
Ha! Love it. Torgo ( talk) 10:41, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
Furius ( talk) 13:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Because they're all out of their minds bro. And you love it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.7.236.88 ( talk) 12:01, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
This article gives the following as an example of the use of an em dash: "such as Darth Vader's line "I sense something, a presence I have not felt since—" in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." While a line from a well-known movie might be a good source for an example when talking about grammar, Darth Vader spoke this line, he did not write it. Most users of this article would be interested in how to use the different dashes when writing, so a written example of an em dash should be used instead. Gary ( talk) 19:15, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm removing the bit about figure dashes in phone numbers from the section on figure dashes. As was determined during a discussion at WT:MOS, phone numbers actually use the standard keyboard hyphen, not a figure dash. Therefore the current bit is factually incorrect. oknazevad ( talk) 23:51, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
There does not seem to be any coverage of the dash in 19th-century literature. It was often used to mask profanities:
would be printed as:
giving rise to the common euphemism "dash it" for "damn it".
It was also used in other ways, such as a character in H.G.Wells who was not given a name and was referenced once in the text as "Mr. —".
While such usages are obsolete today, it may be useful to mention it in the article. -- B.D.Mills ( T, C) 00:29, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
it hardly seems a novel usage given the substitution of punctuation (mixed, a series of asterisks, etc.) for profanity in modern text. Mister Dash also doesn't seem very notable, but perhaps that's just because it's intuitive? Mr. X, Mr. —, Mr. ___ -- Belg4mit ( talk) 23:06, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
Since dashes are a common way to create horizontal lines in ASCII/plain text (as with the hyphen and underscore), shouldn't that be mentioned in the article? -- Cab88 ( talk) 07:13, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
Michael Quinion's World Wide Words has an article on three dash-hybrids; the commash, semi-commash, and colash here. -- Palnatoke ( talk) 09:43, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
I have little typesetting knowledge; I apologize in advance if these questions are stupid. From the article: "The figure dash (‒) is so named because it is the same width as a digit, at least in typefaces with digits of equal width (fixed width fonts)." My questions are:
-- RSL xii 19:30, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
The figure-dash section needs an example of usage. The meaning of "when a dash must be used within numbers" is not obvious. 207.188.235.142 ( talk) 15:19, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I replaced it with "while other consider". If Garner's "Modern Usage" is any similar to the Garner "Legal usage", then the book does not say anything like "most people use dash". -- Enric Naval ( talk) 04:35, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
I seemed to be getting into an edit war with an anonymous user, but I realized that their point was that the dashes in question have no real Unicode value, and therefore the use of multiple em dashes was the next best thing (though it may be seen as dashes with spaces between, which isn’t quite right). So I reverted my last edit and added a note on correct visual representation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tphinney ( talk • contribs) 21:38, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Why is there an underscore at the top of the punctuation navbox? An underscore is not a dash, but merely a "dash-like character". 129.10.231.145 ( talk) 16:49, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
For instance, the section about the Em dash says: According to most American sources (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style) and to some British sources (e.g., The Oxford Guide to Style), an em dash should always be set closed (not surrounded by spaces). But the practice in some parts of the English-speaking world, including the style recommended by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (because of the narrow width of newspaper columns), sets it open ... . Now let's look in the following section, "En dash versus Em dash": Various style guides and national varieties of languages prescribe different guidance on dashes. For example, "Dashes are treated differently in the US and UK. In the US, an em-dash with no additional spacing is used. In the UK a spaced en-dash is preferred."[14] As an example of the US style, The Chicago Manual of Style still recommend unspaced em dashes. It's cleverly rewritten, but with no doubt a repetition of what was already said in the previous section. That's why I propose that one of them be removed or (severely) cut down. -andy 217.50.60.6 ( talk) 23:56, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Finding the prescriptive style guide is not much trouble. But are there any corpus studies on how closely those are followed? The perennial edit wars over our MOS:ENDASH suggest that's an interesting topic. Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:04, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
I have removed this section. I intended to cut and paste it here, but with the Wikipedia system below par today, this is quite difficult without surplus minus signs.
In any case, I have three objections;
When describing compiler and linker switches, which dash should be used? For example, GCC has -Wall, -Wextra, -fstack-protector , and -fstack-protector-all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noloader ( talk • contribs) 21:30, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be something missing from this sentence which is in the section of our article titled "Ranges of Values". Wanderer57 ( talk) 02:17, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
The Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) recommends that the word to be used instead of an en dash when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, such as a range of units.
Wanderer57 ( talk) 02:17, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
May be there are some users with direct perception of Unicode code points, but they definitely do not constitute the majority. Practically, there are much confusion and incorrect use of these "similar characters" (most frequently en dashes instead of minus signs, even in Wikipedia, e.g. in recently created article nl:Hydroxide), and the knowledge about exact appearance of such characters may be useful to spot mistakes. In any case, it is easier to discuss something and then remove, than to restore something removed without consensus. Incnis Mrsi ( talk) 08:22, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
)(
enclusures? The description column is there, and other descriptive elements. I think I added clarity by creating the table, before that the lines were undiscernable. It didn't occur to me this was a "consensus" list, edits to be discussed first. -
DePiep (
talk)
13:03, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
)-(
in the column. Must say, I do not quite see what you are pointing at. Is there elsewhere an illustration of what you'd prefer? -
DePiep (
talk)
13:54, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
I hope that someone can clearly separate the page into typographic properties of the dash, and semantic issues surround what its usage *means*. I don't know how much this is done for other punctuation pages, but it greatly aids the reader who is looking for one or the other.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.10.148.201 ( talk) 17:17, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
All that white space below the opening words following the TOC: There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are:
I would not know where to begin, but would either Ed Brey or someone else with the formatting knowledge please improve this article's appearance!
Perhaps the first table could be moved lower down the page.
Regards, -- Gareth Griffith-Jones ( talk) 21:37, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
This article contradicts itself:
Spacing
"En dashes normally do not have spaces around them..."
En dash versus em dash
"...The en dash—always with spaces in running text..."
Pollifax ( talk) 22:01, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
I do a lot of bibliography work and find it not only confusing but annoying having to work around and/or decipher the various codes used just to make a dash, etc. Frankly I am amazed at the amount of documentation that editors are supposed to know just to make a simple dash in between numbers, dates, etc. The dash by itself should suffice. If you need a double wide dash, use two dashes. Want the dash numbers to wrap around?: use the dash with spaces before and aft. What's worse is now we have bots buzzing around injecting these and other similar codes (including ' & n b s p' ) into all the pages. Is there a WP policy that says editors must use these codes in place of the dash, etc? Editors have to type seven characters just to make a dash. I realize that various control characters are sometimes used in the mark-up text but this is getting a little ridiculous. e.g.Seven characters just to make a dash?? -- Gwillhickers ( talk) 19:50, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
I think it would be nice to add some type of pronunciation note at the point these two items are introduced in the introductory paragraph. If not there, then where? Thoughts? Hagurganus ( talk) 01:09, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
It's not only wrong, it's in complete violation of Wiki's own style practices. I'll remove the (bad) source and fix the text but, if it gets restored, could other editors kindly ensure that the lede does not
There are people who use em dashes with spaces around them — hell, I'm one of them — but I do know I'm a minority opinion. — LlywelynII 10:00, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
The previous version of the page had the punctuation mark sidebar moved halfway down the page to accommodate an exhaustive table of programming conventions for creating various dashes. I got everything to fit by breaking up all the {{ key press}} templates being used, but if the final result isn't satisfactory to other editors, the solution is not to break MOS guidelines by putting the sidebar in the wrong place again.
— LlywelynII 11:14, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Hey LlywelynII, in one of your more recent edits(Revision as of 11:04, 3 February 2013) you removed the visuals for keys on alt text, which by itself is no big deal and I don't really mind. But in addition to that, you forgot to add the 0 at the beginning of the codes, making it lead to ù and û instead of — and –. The code I'm talking about is ALT+151 and ALT+150, whereas its supposed to be ALT+0151 and ALT+0150. I'm assuming it was an accident.
What bothers me even more though, is the way you edit the pages. The recent edit history currently includes several incredibly redundant changes by you. Instead of saving the page over and over again between edits, just to look at the result. Press show preview, and do all your edits in one single save if possible. I mean you had like 5 pages, if not more, of just you repeatedly changing the same setting, over and over again. In total you did 21 edits in less than an hour of time, the great majority of them minor, if not all, which is unacceptable in any case.
This makes it pretty difficult to go through the edit history as I did due to the fault, to find the specific edit in question that caused it.
Another thing to note, please write summaries for you edits in the future, and don't forget to check the minor edit box when you do smaller edits.
Dux Ducis Hodiernus ( talk) 11:43, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
Oh boy! It just dawned on me this morning that I have never typed a single dash (of whatever sort) during the one year I have (now and then) been making edits on the English-language wiki. The reason being: a) I keep forgetting that you use dashes by the bucketful in English, (so I write -- as we would in French, -- the India-Pakistan War, the employer-employee meeting, the North-South Dialogue, the 1939-1945 War, pp. 14-16, etc., etc., etc.); b) in the rare instances I suspect there should be a dash, I give up -- as I never remember how to type one. Hyphens are so user-friendly! (I'll try to amend myself from now on.)-- Lubiesque ( talk) 14:39, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
I'm talking about this particular portion:
"Either version may be used to denote a break in a sentence or to set off parenthetical statements, although writers are generally cautioned to use a single form consistently within their work. In this function, en dashes are used with spaces and em dashes are used without them:"
Nowhere does the author of the reference make this claim and is, in fact, contradictory to his own usage of the parenthetical em dashes. I'm a noobie at wiki, I just felt I should bring it up so that someone who does know what they're doing can review my statement and make the change accordingly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.132.229.234 ( talk) 21:43, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
First, make the thing the right way. There are a few ways to do it, but generally, on a keyboard, you can do as follows: previous word/no space/two hyphens/no space/following word. Word-processing programs turn the two hyphens into an unbroken line that’s roughly the width of a capital “M” — hence the official name of this punctuation mark, the em-dash. (Some publications, including this newspaper, add spaces around dashes.)
I added a note in the section about using en-dashes to attach modifiers to open or compound phrases. It's not as a guide to style but rather to caution a writer that if things are getting this complicated, perhaps they should unpack the phrase instead. I couldn't find a good reference online but will try to find one on paper. Monado ( talk) 16:15, 22 June 2013 (UTC)
Interested parties are invited to participate: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Proposed_change_.282.29 startswithj ( talk) 23:23, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
Deleted 18:06, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
"The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—), named for the length of a typeface's lower-case n and upper-case M respectively."
Then later in the article: "The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M respectively,[8][9] and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters."
The image should show lowercase n,m and uppercase N M. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.128.188.180 ( talk) 14:29, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=Em_(typography)#History has a good explanation with a good picture. Terrel Shumway ( talk) 13:58, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
"Em and en refer to units of typographic measurement, not to the letters M and N. In a traditional metal font, the em was the vertical distance from the top of a piece of type to the bottom. The en was half the size of the em. Originally, the width of the em and en dashes corresponded to these units. In today’s digital fonts, they run narrower." [1]
See also: [2]
References
Terrel Shumway ( talk) 13:52, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 |
== Can someone clarify whether the en dash consists of one or two lines, and edit the article to make this clear? At present it indicates that the en dash is half the length of the em dash, but this does not appear to be the case if the en dash consists of two lines. Instead it appears that the individual lines are half the length, but that when put together as a pair, they look a similar length to the em dash. Christidy ( talk) 19:51, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I now think that perhaps I have a font problem with my browser. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.3 for Solaris SPARC. When I visit the "Dash" page, the en dash shows up as --. Also, when I view biographies, dates of birth and death are separated by --. Can anyone tell me if they see the same thing? Many thanks.
Christidy (
talk)
20:03, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I feel very strongly that the article should mention that a double-hyphen--when used as a dash--tends to look ugly. — Frungi 5 July 2005 03:29 (UTC)
According to the article, the figure dash (‒) is the same as the minus sign (−), but they are not the same.
1+2−3 not equal to 1+2‒3
Another example:
−‒−‒− ‒ − ‒ − ‒
In my font at least, they are not the same height or width, and only the minus sign corresponds to the plus sign.
Hyphen:
+-=-
-+-=
=====
-----
Minus sign:
+−=−
−+−=
=====
−−−−−
Figure Dash:
+‒=‒
‒+‒=
=====
‒‒‒‒‒
-
Omegatron 21:13, Mar 16, 2004 (UTC)
Copied here and expanded:
634‒5789 is from the Steve Cropper/ Eddie Floyd song of the same title originally recorded by Wilson Pickett in 1966, which also appeared in the Blues Brothers 2000 movie. Most phone companies world-wide refuse to give out the number, because for the past few decades since the song appeared on air it's being called many times daily. It has been covered by Jon Bon Jovi, Tina Turner, and many other artists. — Jor (Darkelf) 22:53, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
this is really strange -- I keep hitting an edit link for "Dash usage question", the last one on the page, twice now, and I get the "== The phone number ==" section, not the section I am trying to mess with. By any chance is the excess spacing between the equals causing trouble? This unsigned msg is older than 22:35, 8 May 2005; most editors will not want to waste their time on it. -- Jerzy• t 21:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
When does one use the comma, and when does one use a dash (and of what type)? In fact, where are parenthesis more appropriate?
I guess these questions are directed as regards British usage – or more particularly, Hiberno–english practice – seeing as I'm in Ireland!
Zoney 15:51, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
It seems that the em dash and the semi colon are similar to each other, in that they both are stronger than a comma, but less than a period. From the usage I have seen, the em dash seems closer to a comma, and a semicolon seems closer to a period. Am I correct in this? Should this be added to the article? Thanks, -- Pordaria 19:05, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
In the article 16th century is this phrase "that century which lasted from 1501-1600"
As I see it, if you are going to use from then you should use to instead of a dash (of whatever variety). ;Bear 23:06, 2004 Apr 14 (UTC)
To quote Wikipedia's own Semantic progression article:
Which dash should be used in this case? Seems like an em dash is called for (or you could replace the dash with a simple comma), but no fitting example is given in the Dash article. -- Itai 22:21, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)
CMS ed. 15, 6.88, "An em dash or a pair of em dashes sets off an amplifying or explanatory element." This seems to be described in the article as a parenthetical phrase. - Nunh-huh 22:29, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Under en dash it states:
Under em dash it states:
In a face where the "N" is not half the width of the "M", which definition wins? Jake 20:11, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Both here and in linked articles (em dash, en dash) there's the frequent assertion that en = 1/2 em, which is emphatically not true, as can be demonstrated by experimentation with different fonts. As a generalization, em spaces and em dashes are usually designed to be equal to the point size of the font, so that 1 em equals 12 points in a 12 pt. font. Also as a generalization, en spaces and dashes are designed to be equal to the width of numerals, so that as an expedient, tables can be aligned without the use of tabs. This deserves more research, but empirically, 1 en = 2/3 em might be in the right ballpark. Philosophy of the type designer or type house seems to come into play: for instance, some em and/or en dashes appear to incorporate a small amount of white space to the left and right of the character; some don't. Some fonts do appear to use 1 en = 1/2 em, but if ever that was an inflexible rule, I doubt it extended much beyond 1900. Display faces (i.e. those designed for brief passages of text, in advertising or decorative uses), and condensed faces, tend to jettison such rules. If for instance a condensed face were to use em dashes equal to the point size, the dashes would then be the same length as that in the uncondensed version of the font, and therefore felt as disproportionate by the reader. Paulownia5 20:25, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
Google says both:
So traditionally em was the width of an M, and in modern digitized fonts it is the point size of the font. Whether the en is half or N sized, I don't know. - Omegatron 21:49, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
Despite all the suggestions to the contrary in the article, Safari 1.2 on 10.3.4 displays every single one of the dashes correctly. This can be verified by dragging-and-dropping each of them into the "Favorites" section of the Character Palette and then selecting them. The "Character Info" section at the bottom of the palette will then tell you what Unicode character you're looking at (e.g. "horizontal bar" or "em dash"), and for all of the examples in the article it reports the correct one.
By the way, this is also true for all of the spaces listed in the spaces article except for the Ogham space and the medium mathematical space.
Now, many/most of these kinds of characters (glyphs?) appear in only a few fonts--often just the system's default (Lucida Grande) or, at best, Big Caslon and some of the CJK fonts with a gazillion characters. I'm guessing that Safari is just using whichever font it can find to display the characters, which most of the time is probably Lucida Grande.
FWIW.
--anonymous WP newbie
Though we, and every serious written material, should make the correct usage of dashes I really don't think most people know that there are different types, let alone use them. Perhaps there should be a mention made that these rules are very formal and most people ignore them anyway? violet/riga 16:52, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
50–60% or 50%–60%
50–100 W or 50 W–100 W
- Omegatron 01:01, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
Or is it simply an example in which "to" should be used instead? - Omegatron 20:17, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
Although I eliminated the self-reference, currently this article reads like "A Wikipedia editor's guide to dashes", with a very strong focus on their use in web pages, rather than an overview of dashes in general. In particular, nothing of their history is mentioned. While I don't doubt the general applicability of the material to all web pages, we could do with a lot more information on dashes. Derrick Coetzee 01:48, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The first line or the article reads:
The next thing to appear is this table:
glyph | Unicode | HTML | |
---|---|---|---|
dash (hyphen) | - | ASCII 45 0x2D | |
figure dash | ‒ | U+2012 | |
en dash | – | U+2013 | – |
em dash | — | U+2014 | — |
quotation dash | ― | U+2015 | |
swung dash | ⁓ | U+2053 |
So is it a hyphen, or isn't it? - Vague | Rant 05:42, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)
Other style guides I've checked seem to agree with that. Where then does this (wrong?) use of the em dash come from? Is it confusion with another dash? Jordi· ✆ 03:55, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Thank you so much for these articles and the judicious redirects. — Peter Hitchmough
Should the wave dash be listed as a dash? Thoughts and comments please.
Can someone give an example of usage for —.
The initial definitions of en- and em-dashes use the
unicode template, and look different (at least, in
IE) from actual uses of &ndash
and &mdash
. I assume the unicode template is correct - so the article should at least use it consistently.
The corollary of this is that whenever you want to make an en- or em-dash in Wikipedia, you should not use the HTML entity, but instead the unicode template or a copy-paste...? ··gracefool | ☺ 03:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
This page needs to mention the use of long dashes in bibliographies. ― BenFrantzDale 07:24, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
On the public computer that I am using, the swung dash is not correctly depicted. It appears as a skinny vertical rectangle.
The text says that a math-mode command $\sim$ should be used in LaTeX for the swung dash. However, the use of a math mode command for a text mode symbol because it 'looks right' is bad TeX. My immediate thought for the text-mode equivalent is \textasciitilde, but that's too short. JadeNB 19:03, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Svyatoslav ( talk) 04:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with this use of en dashes. It would be nice to have a reference for further reading. (What I have read recommends not using hyphens in compound adjectives.) Eric 11:18, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
I've also seen and used this. It's equivalent to the semicolon replacing the comma in long clauses. — DIV ( 128.250.204.118 02:21, 20 July 2007 (UTC))
Which dash (if any) is to be used in a date, e.g., 2006-02-23? — Chris Page 01:34, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
Dashes are very commonly used in lists to separate a term from its definition (or similarly related pieces of information), like this:
My question is, which dashes are appropriate for such lists? — mjb 00:52, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
The "Summary" section has a prescriptive tone - which is undesirable and at odds with the rest of the article - and is directed at the reader. It would be easy to change it to the passive voice, eg "... the figure dash is used", but I'm not sure this is best either. Nurg 23:17, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
What sources support using an em dash in open ranges? For open ranges that are years specifically, CMS 14 rule 5.115 requires an en dash. I can't find any comment on other types of numbers in CMS. — Naddy 15:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
So what dash do you use if a word doesn't fit on a line, and is cut in half by a dash in-
between syllables?
Mrdebeuker
21:47, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
Of course 'in between' is two words, not one, so that hyphen doesn't belong (although the question itself is still valid). JadeNB 19:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Can we please not use the text itself as an example for the text itself? Set examples of typography apart from the text in their own boxes, so they can be compared, aren't changed by editors who don't understand them, are clear to people who have never encountered them before or don't speak the language, etc.
Or — something like this
Or—something like this
See also Wikipedia_talk:Avoid_self-references#Self-referential_content. — Omegatron 16:41, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
In editing the subsection on the en dash I found one occurrence of hyphen–minus, and elsewhere hyphen-minus (with a hyphen, not an en dash). There are arguments for each form: if hyphen modifies minus, a hyphen would be used, by the criteria in the article itself; but if the entity is as much a hyphen as it is a minus, so that it could equally have been called minus–hyphen, then arguably the en dash is called for. I changed things to the form with the en dash in the subsection I edited; but the whole article should be consistent in this (especially when one considers that its topic is dashes). So which form is better? Personally, I don't care very much. I just strive for consistency – especially consistency within a whole article. Noetica 00:23, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Wouldn't it make more sense to render that as "high-priority, high-pressure tasks"? If a task is both, say, urgent and difficult, you wouldn't call it an "urgent-difficult task", you'd call it an "urgent, difficult task". I can't think of a context where one would naturally compound the two adjectives "high-priority" and "high-pressure".
Looking at the following two lines, the first clearly is using dashes, while the second clearly has hyphens. Yet if you click on "edit this article", they look exactly the same in the edit box. What's going on here?
time–of–flight
time-of-flight
Flarity 21:39, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
So why is the edit page font different from the regular font? Flarity 06:34, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
This article mentions the dash being used as a method of quotation when writing conversation. It directs the reader to the "quotation dash section" of the Quotation Mark article, but such a section does not exist. How dashes are supposed to be used in the place of quotation marks remains a mystery, based on how the articles currently stand. 69.64.3.12 15:23, 7 December 2006 (UTC)Derek (Better late than never). In some languages, e.g., French and Hungarian, conversations are often rendered thus:
These are considered quotations from the speakers. kovesp ( talk) 00:36, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
From the article, "They can also be used around parenthetical statements – such as this one – in place of the em dashes preferred by some publishers..."
That, I daresay, is the most absolutely fucking brilliant thing I think I have ever read on Wikipedia. My intense respect to whoever contributed that.
69.113.219.44—The preceding signed but undated comment was added at 07:20, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
According to the article, the en dash can be used as “a connection between two things of almost any kind….” It then goes on to list some examples that fit this definition:
I was not aware this was proper usage of the en dash. As I understand it, in all five of those cases, the hyphen is appropriate. This usage should be verified and cited (if it is indeed proper).— Kbolino 11:49, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I've added a FACT tag to the relevant sentence in this article. I have seen the en dash used for "Foo-Bar Theorem" in one and only one place: other wikipedia articles. I assume this practice did start elsewhere but it does seem a little unlikely that the article text claiming that it is more common than the hyphen for this practice is correct. Quietbritishjim ( talk) 17:05, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
Dicklyon, you removed this text:
Some argue that the unspaced em dash risks introducing exaggerated spacing, in full justification.
Your edit summary:
given the confusion, let's just omit the weasel words; if there's a source for who thinks what about this, we can add it
What confusion, in the section in question? For sentence-level punctuation, some publishers prefer em dashes (spaced or not), and some prefer spaced en dashes. And they have their various reasons. The words you struck out were not weasel words. (Look at that article's definition; Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_words does not respect that definition, by the way.) If you think that the text needs a citation, then say that: don't just delete it. The sentence simply attempts to give one reason for publisher's choices, and is perfectly comprehensible. Comprehensible, but wrong! In fact the sentence was originally about the spaced em dash. I'll now restore it to say what it originally said, and expand it.
The spaced em dash risks introducing excessive separation of words: it is already long, and the spaces increase the separation. In full justification, the adjacent spaces may be stretched, and the separation of words is further exaggerated.
Anomalocaris, you have now seen to it that the article has a dozen references to The Chicago Manual of Style, hugely outnumbering appeals to all other authorities. The article is therefore biased against other established practice, especially practice outside of America. I may well apply a marker disputing its neutrality, for that reason. Please respect NPOV. I'll try to find time to restore some balance. – Noetica♬♩ Talk 23:44, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
In some compositional styles farther from Chicago :-) , such as in Portuguese, the em dash must be enclosed with spaces, unless followed by a comma. I am now using Openoffice.org Writer and have difficulty in producing em dashes (maybe just temporary ignorance); the PC keyboard combination Alt-0515 seems to produce something that looks like it, though too similar to an en dash. Some word processors do have a key combination for it.
Also, though the soft hyphen is mentioned, there is no mention to the hard hyphen, a hyphen that is present wether hyphenation occurs or not (that's not the same as the regular hyphen!), and can be combined with a soft hyphen to produce the correct hyphenation of portuguese hyphenated words ( WordPerfect had it, Word, AFAIK, never had.) For instance,
"entendamo-nos" is expected to be hyphenated on a line break to "entendamo- -nos" not "entendamo- nos"
That required a soft hyphen followed by a hard hyphen. Most current word processors do not produce the correct hyphenation for portuguese and do not allow it to be produced either. Portuguese is the sixth or seventh most spoken language in the world though, when it comes to buying word processors, it must be far down the list. Xyzt1234 18:23, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Regarding my removed comments about the 'The Elements of Typographic Style' Applied to the Web, the Trebuchet MS font (which I use exclusively) en dash (–) and em dash (—) are much shorter than in Times New Roman (–) and em dash (—). Hence, using en dashes in this font is essentially useless since it looks only barely longer than a hyphen/minus sign (-). However, the figure dash (‒) is longer than the en dash. Font differences need to be explicitly pointed out in this article--and why not everyone agrees to the use of specific dashes (en, em, figure, whatever!) related to font differences. ∞ ΣɛÞ² ( τ| c) 10:36, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
For example in any sport, where two teams have the same amount of points in the standings, the use a dash (I'm not sure which) for the second one in place of a position number, which dash would be used in that case? Bsroiaadn Talk 22:04, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Standard for years is 2001 - 03. 2001 ‐ 03. Londo06 15:11, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The usage of the em-dash is different in different countries. In Poland we have many long dashes and they have spaces around. Some kind of long dashes, whether em-dashes or another kind of simmilar length, is also used to separate dialogs in prose:
-- How are you? -- I asked him.
-- I am -- he said with some hesitation -- fine.
In German books I read there were single quotes and commas:
'I am', he said, 'fine'.
When using em-dashes for dialogs, one can not embed a pause into the characters words, but instead an ellipsis could be placed:
-- I am... fine.
Em-dashes are acceptable in plays (drama):
HAMLET
To be -- or -- not to -- be...
Because there is no narration -- a drama is simply a long dialog with some comments.
When it comes to aesthetics -- most people probably prefer what they are used to. It is simmilar to source code indentation wars, however, when already consistently used, some styles may be supreme to others. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.17.205.182 ( talk) 13:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Something I'd like to see in the article is info about what kind of dashes are appropriate for sports scores and win-loss records. For example, The Colorado Rockies beat the San Diego Padres 9-8 to finish the regular season with a record of 90-73. — mjb 23:32, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
"The em dash is used in much the way a colon or set of parentheses is used: it can show an abrupt change in thought or be used where a full stop (or "period") is too strong and a comma too weak." Shouldn't colon (:) be replaced by semicolon (;) in that sentence? My understanding is that semicolons indicate a separation of line of thought; colons indicate an expansion: consequence, description, clarification, etc.
Another issue: "Alone among punctuation that marks pauses or logical relations in text, the unspaced em dash disables [variable spacing] for the words between which it falls." Isn't that also true of the slash (/)? Ayla ( talk) 23:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
I wish to suggest that we add a Cleanup request on the Dash page. The entire page seems very unorganized, and many parts can be joined together. What do you think?
Lelandrb ( talk) 23:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
I wonder whether it is common in English to use a dash in the case of a non-parenthetical apposition or relative clause – which would call for an example in the article then. -- Quilbert ( talk) 15:19, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Which dash style should be used in chemical formulas? This isn't listed here or on the chemical formula page. I have text with items such as "-COOH". Wakablogger2 ( talk) 03:04, 4 May 2008 (UTC)Wakablogger2
I removed this phrase because it is not encyclopedic. Wikipedia is not a style guide. I'm not debating the merit of it, however the statement as it is currently written is not verifiable since it is a prescription. It is not an encyclopedia's place to tell readers what "the important thing" is. – flamurai ( t) 05:00, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
"...Chinese character which means one in both Chinese and Japanese." I suggest renaming the first "Chinese" to "Hanzi". Benlisquare ( talk) 11:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Many popular media players use the “⟨Artist⟩ - ⟨Song⟩” format, as in “The Beatles - Yesterday”. Does anybody know who invented that and whether there is any agreement as to the separator character? 78.110.162.163 ( talk) 10:58, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Hey the paget is currently blocked, however could someone add the latex formatting from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Formatting ? basically it says that hyphen = - en dash = -- em dash = --- minus = $-$ *** —Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.232.144.109 ( talk) 02:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
I haven't managed to get the Ctrl–Numberic Hyphen or Ctrl–Alt–Numeric Hyphen to work on Windows Vista. I have to access the numpad via a function key on my laptop keyboard, so maybe that messes with it. But is anyone sure it works? Tophtucker ( talk) 04:35, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
I was wondering why we claimed the en dash is half the width of the em dash, so I did a book search, and sure enough there are quite a few books that say so; on the other hand, it is demonstrably incorrect in most modern fonts and books. What's going on here? Dicklyon ( talk) 15:58, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
More recent sources say that the en and em dash lengths are not standard or related to letter widths (in all typefaces, although they may be in some): [5]. Tijfo098 ( talk) 14:42, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
I'm seeing a formatting problem, not just here but elsewhere.
In the "En-dash" section, where it says "recommends that the word to be used", the underlying source code clearly shows that the word "to" should be italicised, making a clear and grammatically correct sentence. However — on my system at least (Mac OS 10.4.11) — it doesn't appear italicised, making nonsense of the sentence: that is, coding like this no longer appears to make words appear in italics in the main article. This has been the case for a few months. Paul Magnussen ( talk) 15:22, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
In Victorian novels, a long dash is sometimes used in the same way an asterisk can be, to hide part of a taboo word, for instance 'D——' instead of 'Damn'. Also, in dates in such novels, it often says 18—— instead of, say, 1848. Why is that? -- 193.128.72.68 ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:59, 21 August 2009 (UTC).
[...]often demarcates a parenthetical thought—like this one—
Ha! Love it. Torgo ( talk) 10:41, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
Furius ( talk) 13:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Because they're all out of their minds bro. And you love it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.7.236.88 ( talk) 12:01, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
This article gives the following as an example of the use of an em dash: "such as Darth Vader's line "I sense something, a presence I have not felt since—" in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." While a line from a well-known movie might be a good source for an example when talking about grammar, Darth Vader spoke this line, he did not write it. Most users of this article would be interested in how to use the different dashes when writing, so a written example of an em dash should be used instead. Gary ( talk) 19:15, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm removing the bit about figure dashes in phone numbers from the section on figure dashes. As was determined during a discussion at WT:MOS, phone numbers actually use the standard keyboard hyphen, not a figure dash. Therefore the current bit is factually incorrect. oknazevad ( talk) 23:51, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
There does not seem to be any coverage of the dash in 19th-century literature. It was often used to mask profanities:
would be printed as:
giving rise to the common euphemism "dash it" for "damn it".
It was also used in other ways, such as a character in H.G.Wells who was not given a name and was referenced once in the text as "Mr. —".
While such usages are obsolete today, it may be useful to mention it in the article. -- B.D.Mills ( T, C) 00:29, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
it hardly seems a novel usage given the substitution of punctuation (mixed, a series of asterisks, etc.) for profanity in modern text. Mister Dash also doesn't seem very notable, but perhaps that's just because it's intuitive? Mr. X, Mr. —, Mr. ___ -- Belg4mit ( talk) 23:06, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
Since dashes are a common way to create horizontal lines in ASCII/plain text (as with the hyphen and underscore), shouldn't that be mentioned in the article? -- Cab88 ( talk) 07:13, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
Michael Quinion's World Wide Words has an article on three dash-hybrids; the commash, semi-commash, and colash here. -- Palnatoke ( talk) 09:43, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
I have little typesetting knowledge; I apologize in advance if these questions are stupid. From the article: "The figure dash (‒) is so named because it is the same width as a digit, at least in typefaces with digits of equal width (fixed width fonts)." My questions are:
-- RSL xii 19:30, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
The figure-dash section needs an example of usage. The meaning of "when a dash must be used within numbers" is not obvious. 207.188.235.142 ( talk) 15:19, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I replaced it with "while other consider". If Garner's "Modern Usage" is any similar to the Garner "Legal usage", then the book does not say anything like "most people use dash". -- Enric Naval ( talk) 04:35, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
I seemed to be getting into an edit war with an anonymous user, but I realized that their point was that the dashes in question have no real Unicode value, and therefore the use of multiple em dashes was the next best thing (though it may be seen as dashes with spaces between, which isn’t quite right). So I reverted my last edit and added a note on correct visual representation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tphinney ( talk • contribs) 21:38, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
Why is there an underscore at the top of the punctuation navbox? An underscore is not a dash, but merely a "dash-like character". 129.10.231.145 ( talk) 16:49, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
For instance, the section about the Em dash says: According to most American sources (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style) and to some British sources (e.g., The Oxford Guide to Style), an em dash should always be set closed (not surrounded by spaces). But the practice in some parts of the English-speaking world, including the style recommended by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (because of the narrow width of newspaper columns), sets it open ... . Now let's look in the following section, "En dash versus Em dash": Various style guides and national varieties of languages prescribe different guidance on dashes. For example, "Dashes are treated differently in the US and UK. In the US, an em-dash with no additional spacing is used. In the UK a spaced en-dash is preferred."[14] As an example of the US style, The Chicago Manual of Style still recommend unspaced em dashes. It's cleverly rewritten, but with no doubt a repetition of what was already said in the previous section. That's why I propose that one of them be removed or (severely) cut down. -andy 217.50.60.6 ( talk) 23:56, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
Finding the prescriptive style guide is not much trouble. But are there any corpus studies on how closely those are followed? The perennial edit wars over our MOS:ENDASH suggest that's an interesting topic. Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:04, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
I have removed this section. I intended to cut and paste it here, but with the Wikipedia system below par today, this is quite difficult without surplus minus signs.
In any case, I have three objections;
When describing compiler and linker switches, which dash should be used? For example, GCC has -Wall, -Wextra, -fstack-protector , and -fstack-protector-all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noloader ( talk • contribs) 21:30, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be something missing from this sentence which is in the section of our article titled "Ranges of Values". Wanderer57 ( talk) 02:17, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
The Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI) recommends that the word to be used instead of an en dash when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, such as a range of units.
Wanderer57 ( talk) 02:17, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
May be there are some users with direct perception of Unicode code points, but they definitely do not constitute the majority. Practically, there are much confusion and incorrect use of these "similar characters" (most frequently en dashes instead of minus signs, even in Wikipedia, e.g. in recently created article nl:Hydroxide), and the knowledge about exact appearance of such characters may be useful to spot mistakes. In any case, it is easier to discuss something and then remove, than to restore something removed without consensus. Incnis Mrsi ( talk) 08:22, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
)(
enclusures? The description column is there, and other descriptive elements. I think I added clarity by creating the table, before that the lines were undiscernable. It didn't occur to me this was a "consensus" list, edits to be discussed first. -
DePiep (
talk)
13:03, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
)-(
in the column. Must say, I do not quite see what you are pointing at. Is there elsewhere an illustration of what you'd prefer? -
DePiep (
talk)
13:54, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
I hope that someone can clearly separate the page into typographic properties of the dash, and semantic issues surround what its usage *means*. I don't know how much this is done for other punctuation pages, but it greatly aids the reader who is looking for one or the other.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.10.148.201 ( talk) 17:17, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
All that white space below the opening words following the TOC: There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are:
I would not know where to begin, but would either Ed Brey or someone else with the formatting knowledge please improve this article's appearance!
Perhaps the first table could be moved lower down the page.
Regards, -- Gareth Griffith-Jones ( talk) 21:37, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
This article contradicts itself:
Spacing
"En dashes normally do not have spaces around them..."
En dash versus em dash
"...The en dash—always with spaces in running text..."
Pollifax ( talk) 22:01, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
I do a lot of bibliography work and find it not only confusing but annoying having to work around and/or decipher the various codes used just to make a dash, etc. Frankly I am amazed at the amount of documentation that editors are supposed to know just to make a simple dash in between numbers, dates, etc. The dash by itself should suffice. If you need a double wide dash, use two dashes. Want the dash numbers to wrap around?: use the dash with spaces before and aft. What's worse is now we have bots buzzing around injecting these and other similar codes (including ' & n b s p' ) into all the pages. Is there a WP policy that says editors must use these codes in place of the dash, etc? Editors have to type seven characters just to make a dash. I realize that various control characters are sometimes used in the mark-up text but this is getting a little ridiculous. e.g.Seven characters just to make a dash?? -- Gwillhickers ( talk) 19:50, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
I think it would be nice to add some type of pronunciation note at the point these two items are introduced in the introductory paragraph. If not there, then where? Thoughts? Hagurganus ( talk) 01:09, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
It's not only wrong, it's in complete violation of Wiki's own style practices. I'll remove the (bad) source and fix the text but, if it gets restored, could other editors kindly ensure that the lede does not
There are people who use em dashes with spaces around them — hell, I'm one of them — but I do know I'm a minority opinion. — LlywelynII 10:00, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
The previous version of the page had the punctuation mark sidebar moved halfway down the page to accommodate an exhaustive table of programming conventions for creating various dashes. I got everything to fit by breaking up all the {{ key press}} templates being used, but if the final result isn't satisfactory to other editors, the solution is not to break MOS guidelines by putting the sidebar in the wrong place again.
— LlywelynII 11:14, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Hey LlywelynII, in one of your more recent edits(Revision as of 11:04, 3 February 2013) you removed the visuals for keys on alt text, which by itself is no big deal and I don't really mind. But in addition to that, you forgot to add the 0 at the beginning of the codes, making it lead to ù and û instead of — and –. The code I'm talking about is ALT+151 and ALT+150, whereas its supposed to be ALT+0151 and ALT+0150. I'm assuming it was an accident.
What bothers me even more though, is the way you edit the pages. The recent edit history currently includes several incredibly redundant changes by you. Instead of saving the page over and over again between edits, just to look at the result. Press show preview, and do all your edits in one single save if possible. I mean you had like 5 pages, if not more, of just you repeatedly changing the same setting, over and over again. In total you did 21 edits in less than an hour of time, the great majority of them minor, if not all, which is unacceptable in any case.
This makes it pretty difficult to go through the edit history as I did due to the fault, to find the specific edit in question that caused it.
Another thing to note, please write summaries for you edits in the future, and don't forget to check the minor edit box when you do smaller edits.
Dux Ducis Hodiernus ( talk) 11:43, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
Oh boy! It just dawned on me this morning that I have never typed a single dash (of whatever sort) during the one year I have (now and then) been making edits on the English-language wiki. The reason being: a) I keep forgetting that you use dashes by the bucketful in English, (so I write -- as we would in French, -- the India-Pakistan War, the employer-employee meeting, the North-South Dialogue, the 1939-1945 War, pp. 14-16, etc., etc., etc.); b) in the rare instances I suspect there should be a dash, I give up -- as I never remember how to type one. Hyphens are so user-friendly! (I'll try to amend myself from now on.)-- Lubiesque ( talk) 14:39, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
I'm talking about this particular portion:
"Either version may be used to denote a break in a sentence or to set off parenthetical statements, although writers are generally cautioned to use a single form consistently within their work. In this function, en dashes are used with spaces and em dashes are used without them:"
Nowhere does the author of the reference make this claim and is, in fact, contradictory to his own usage of the parenthetical em dashes. I'm a noobie at wiki, I just felt I should bring it up so that someone who does know what they're doing can review my statement and make the change accordingly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.132.229.234 ( talk) 21:43, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
First, make the thing the right way. There are a few ways to do it, but generally, on a keyboard, you can do as follows: previous word/no space/two hyphens/no space/following word. Word-processing programs turn the two hyphens into an unbroken line that’s roughly the width of a capital “M” — hence the official name of this punctuation mark, the em-dash. (Some publications, including this newspaper, add spaces around dashes.)
I added a note in the section about using en-dashes to attach modifiers to open or compound phrases. It's not as a guide to style but rather to caution a writer that if things are getting this complicated, perhaps they should unpack the phrase instead. I couldn't find a good reference online but will try to find one on paper. Monado ( talk) 16:15, 22 June 2013 (UTC)
Interested parties are invited to participate: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Proposed_change_.282.29 startswithj ( talk) 23:23, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
Deleted 18:06, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
"The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—), named for the length of a typeface's lower-case n and upper-case M respectively."
Then later in the article: "The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M respectively,[8][9] and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters."
The image should show lowercase n,m and uppercase N M. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.128.188.180 ( talk) 14:29, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=Em_(typography)#History has a good explanation with a good picture. Terrel Shumway ( talk) 13:58, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
"Em and en refer to units of typographic measurement, not to the letters M and N. In a traditional metal font, the em was the vertical distance from the top of a piece of type to the bottom. The en was half the size of the em. Originally, the width of the em and en dashes corresponded to these units. In today’s digital fonts, they run narrower." [1]
See also: [2]
References
Terrel Shumway ( talk) 13:52, 4 August 2016 (UTC)