Hyphen-Minus

The hyphen-minus (-) is the short horizontal stroke on every keyboard, right of the 0 key. ASCII gave it two jobs at once, which is where the double name comes from: it joins words (well-known, e-mail) and it stands in for the minus sign (5 - 3). Typography has a dedicated character for each job — the true hyphen ‐ (U+2010), the minus sign − (U+2212), the en dash – for ranges and the em dash — for breaks in a sentence — but the keyboard only offers this one.

In everyday text the hyphen-minus is perfectly correct between parts of a compound word. Word processors such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs replace " - " typed between spaces with an en dash automatically; if you need a real dash elsewhere, copy it from the dashes set. On a phone the hyphen sits on the first symbols page (123 on iPhone, ?123 on Android).