the.com/hyphen
a tiny dash with the power to start or end a war between sentences
means a short punctuation mark (-) used to join words or parts of words, or to split a word across the end of a line.
from From Greek 'huphen,' meaning 'together' or 'in one' — literally a fusion of 'hupo' (under) and 'hen' (one). The Greeks used it as a sign written beneath two letters to show they should be read as a single unit. It slipped into Latin and then, by the 17th century, into English, still doing the same patient job: telling the eye that two things are really one.
- costly typo
- Missing hyphen doomed NASA's Mariner 1 rocket
- not a dash
- Shorter than en and em dashes
- old name
- Greeks called it hyphen, meaning together
- line breaker
- Splits words across lines since manuscript days
- vanishing act
- Dictionaries quietly delete thousands of hyphens
for instance
en dash — typographic mark that is longer than a hyphen, used for ranges like 1950–1960
hyphenated last names — combined surnames like smith-jones, legally recognized in most english-speaking countries