En dash

The en dash (U+2013, –) is the middle mark of the three that share a key, and it has jobs of its own rather than being a compromise between the other two. It spans: 2019–2024, pages 44–51, 9:00–17:30, where it stands in for the words to or through. It scores and opposes: 51–49, the Ali–Frazier fight. It connects two things that keep their own identity: the London–Paris route, the Bose–Einstein condensate, a client–server split. That last job is where writers most often reach for a hyphen and get a subtly different meaning, since London-Paris reads as one compound name rather than as two places with something running between them.

Two habits keep it honest. Do not mix a dash range with the words that mean the same thing, so from 2019 to 2024 or 2019–2024, never from 2019–2024. And do not use one where a minus sign belongs: − is its own character with its own width and its own position on the line, and setting arithmetic in dashes is the typographic equivalent of a straight quote. In numbers, pair the dash with tabular figures so a column of ranges lines up.

The width is the whole naming scheme. An en is half an em, the em being the square of the type size, so the en dash sits between the hyphen and the longest mark in the family. In practice faces disagree: some draw the en dash noticeably shorter than a true en and some give it generous side bearings, which is why a hyphen and an en dash can look nearly identical in one typeface and obviously different in another. The specimen above rules them against each other for that reason. The third mark, and the question of whether to set an aside with a spaced en dash or with the longer one, belongs to em dash, which also explains why this site never uses the long one in its own prose.