Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and this is part of a week-long series explaining em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens. Today, we’ll be looking at en dashes.
These dashes are shorter than em dashes, but longer than hyphens. They’re typically used to show relationships or ranges. For example, if you’re talking about a range of page numbers or dates, you can separate them with a closed en dash. You can also do this if you’re talking about two related but different things that are being used together as an adjective, such as US–China relations.
Most people don’t use en dashes and instead default to hyphens. Proper use of en dashes is a sign of a very experienced writer or an editor with an eagle eye. Thus, you can really take your writing up a notch with this little punctuation mark.
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