hyphen

The Unicode standard supplies 24 different variants on the hyphen or dash.

Because of its prevalence in legacy encodings, U+002D  -  hyphen minus   is the most common of the dash characters used to represent a hyphen. It has ambiguous semantic value and is rendered with an average width.
U+2010  ‐  hyphen   represents the hyphen as found in words such as left-to-right. It is rendered with a narrow width.
U+2011  ‑  non breaking hyphen   is present for compatibility with existing standards. It has the same semantic value as U+2010 hyphen, but should not be broken across lines.

U+2012  ‒  figure dash   also exists for compatibility. It has the same ambiguous semantics as U+002D hyphen minus, but has the same width as a digit (much like U+2007 figure space from space).
U+2013  –  en dash   is used to indicate a range of values, such as 1973-1984. It should be distinguished from U+2212  −  minus sign   which is an arithmetic operator; however, typographers have typically used en dash for typesetting the minus sign.

U+2014  —  em dash   is used to make a break--like this--in the flow of a sentence. It is commonly approximated with a double-hyphen.
U+2015  ―  horizontal bar   is used to introduce quoted text in some typographic styles.

For a description of the line-breaking properties of dashes and hyphens, see Unicode Technical Report #14 Line Breaking Properties.

Note that tilde is sometimes called swing dash, and horizontal bar is sometimes called quotation dash.

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The 24 characters in this category were added between Unicode versions 1.1 and 3.2

The columns below should be interpreted as :

1. The Unicode code for the character
2. The character in question
3. The Unicode name for the character
4. The Unicode General Category for the character
5. The Unicode version when this character was added
6. The HTML entity if any, instead of using &#xUUUU;
7. (The SGML entities if any)

Basic Latin

     ASCII
U+002D  -  hyphen minus  Pd 1.1  (‐)
U+007E  ~  tilde  Sm 1.1

Latin-1 Supplement

     ISO 8859-1 aka Latin-1
U+00AD  ­  soft hyphen  Pd 1.1  ­  (­)

Spacing Modifier Letters

     miscellaneous phonetic modifiers
U+02D7  ˗  modifier letter minus sign  Sk 1.1

Armenian

     punctuation
U+058A  ֊  Armenian hyphen  Pd 3.0

Mongolian

     punctuation
U+1806  ᠆  Mongolian todo soft hyphen  Pd 3.0

General Punctuation

     formatting characters
U+2010  ‐  hyphen  Pd 1.1  (‐)
U+2011  ‑  non breaking hyphen  Pd 1.1
U+2012  ‒  figure dash  Pd 1.1
U+2013  –  en dash  Pd 1.1  –  (–)
U+2014  —  em dash  Pd 1.1  —  (—)

     general punctuation
U+2027  ‧  hyphenation point  Po 1.1

     general punctuation
U+2043  ⁃  hyphen bullet  Po 1.1  (⁃)

Optical Character Recognition

     OCR
U+2448  ⑈  ocr dash  So 1.1

General Punctuation

     general punctuation
U+2052  ⁒  commercial minus sign  Sm 3.2

Mathematical Operators

     mathematical operators
U+2212  −  minus sign  Sm 1.1  −  (−)

CJK Symbols and Punctuation

     CJK symbols and punctuation
U+301C  〜  wave dash  Pd 1.1

     other CJK symbols
U+3030  〰  wavy dash  Pd 1.1

Katakana

     Katakana punctuation
U+30A0  ゠  Katakana Hiragana double hyphen  Pd 3.2

CJK Compatibility Forms

     glyphs for vertical varients
U+FE31  ︱  presentation form for vertical em dash  Pd 1.1
U+FE32  ︲  presentation form for vertical en dash  Pd 1.1

Small Form Variants

     small form variants
U+FE58  ﹘  small em dash  Pd 1.1
U+FE63  ﹣  small hyphen minus  Pd 1.1

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms

     fullwidth ascii variants
U+FF0D  －  fullwidth hyphen minus  Pd 1.1

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http://unicode.org

Lots of people have problems using hyphens so I thought it would be a good idea to add a few examples to this node.

Examples of usage

Some strong examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens:

Disease causing poor nutrition, meaning that a disease causes poor nutrition, and

Disease-causing poor nutrition, meaning that poor nutrition causes disease

Man-eating shark, meaning a dangerous animal, and

Man eating shark, which reverses the relationship between the two

New age-discrimination rules, meaning new rules regarding discrimination according to age, and

New-age discrimination rules, meaning rules regarding discrimination (not necessarily according to age) consistent with the New Age movement

Additional examples of proper use:

text-only document (but ... document is text only)
Detroit-based organization (but ... organization is Detroit based)
state-of-the-art product (but ... product is state of the art)
board-certified strategy (but ... strategy is board certified)
thought-provoking argument (but ... argument is thought provoking)
time-sensitive error (but ... error is time sensitive)
case-sensitive password (but ... password is case sensitive)
government-issued photo ID (but ... photo ID is government issued, or, better, ... is issued by the government)
light-gathering surface (but ... surface is light gathering)
award-winning novel (but ... novel is award winning, or, more likely, ... won an award)
web-based encyclopedia (but ... encyclopedia is web based)
fun-loving person (but ... person is fun loving)
how to wire-transfer funds
how to tax-plan
advertising-supported service (but ... service is advertising supported, or, better, ... is supported by advertising)

Hy"phen (?), n. [L., fr. Gr. , fr. under one, into one, together, fr. under + , neut. of one. See Hypo-.] Print.

A mark or short dash, thus [-], placed at the end of a line which terminates with a syllable of a word, the remainder of which is carried to the next line; or between the parts of many a compound word; as in fine-leaved, clear-headed. It is also sometimes used to separate the syllables of words.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Hy"phen, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Hyphened (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Hyphening.]

To connect with, or separate by, a hyphen, as two words or the parts of a word.

 

© Webster 1913.