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A hyphen is short. It is nominally (although this varies between fonts)
one-third of an em wide. (An em is a square that is the same width as
the point size of the type.) It is the character you get when you press
the hyphen key (next to the zero) on your keyboard.
An en dash is one en wide. An en is one-half of an em. On a PC, you can
type an en dash by holding down the Alt key and, with the Num Lock
turned on, typing 0150 on the keypad. You can also create an en dash
other ways, depending on the application you are working in.
An em dash is one em wide. You can see what one looks like by typing
Alt+0151.
The grammatical punctuation mark called "dash" is represented in type as
an em dash by most typographers. Some prefer the convention MS Office
applications default to of "space, en dash, space" to represent the
grammatical dash. This can be ambiguous in technical documents that
contain mathematical expressions, as it is virtually indistinguishable
from a minus sign. In most cases, though, context will guide the reader.
Dick
Justin Cascio wrote:
>
> I thought an en-dash was the same as regular dash, and an em-dash was a long
> one. Is that not so? At any rate, it may be their Word AutoCorrect feature
> flaring up.
>
