From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography
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27 Show ranges, using en dashes
From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography
27 Show ranges, using en dashes
- Law 27. Show Ranges Using En Dashes. What is an en dash? An en dash is a dash that's larger than an hyphen but smaller than an em dash. Now, many people aren't familiar with en dashes and when to use them. When people use typewriters, the choices are really between using a hyphen or a double hyphen. There's nothing in between, on a typewriter. But the en dash is that in-between character and it does have important uses. What are those uses? And when should you use an en dash? Well, most commonly, en dashes are used to show ranges of time, ranges of duration or ranges of distance. So, for example, if you're talking about January through June, 2 o'clock to 5 o'clock, Monday through Friday, 2001 to 2003, pages 230 to 255 or the Florida-Texas Flight Path. In all of those cases, we're talking about ranges and an en dash is the proper character to use. En dashes are also used to join words when at least one word is an open compound. Open compounds are usually two-word proper nouns. So…
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