2022–23 In Australian Basketball

The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the emdash , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontalbar , whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.

History

In the early 1600s, in Okes-printed plays of William Shakespeare, dashes are attested that indicate a thinking pause, interruption, mid-speech realization, or change of subject. The dashes are variously longer (as in King Lear reprinted 1619) or composed of hyphens (as in Othello printed 1622); moreover, the dashes are often, but not always, prefixed by a comma, colon, or semicolon.

In 1733, in Jonathan Swift's ''On Poetry'', the terms ''break'' and ''dash'' are attested for and marks:

Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when Invention fails;
To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

Your poem finish'd, next your Care
Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
Set off with num'rous ''Breaks''⸺and ''Dashes''—

Types of dash

Usage varies both within English and within other languages, but the usual conventions for the most common dashes in printed English text are these:

* An (unspaced) em dash or a spaced en dash can be used to mark a break in a sentence, and a pair can be used to set off a parenthetical statement. For example:

* An en dash, but not an em dash, indicates spans or differentiation, where it may replace "and", "to", or "through". For example:

* An em dash or horizontal bar, but not an en dash, is used to set off the source of a direct quotation. For example:

* A horizontal bar (also called ''quotation dash'') or the em dash, but not the en dash, introduces quoted text.

Figure dash

The figure dash (, ) has the same width as a numerical digit; most fonts have digits of equal width. It is used within numbers (e.g., the phone number 555‒0199), especially in columns, for maintaining alignment. In contrast, the en dash is generally used for a range of values. The minus sign () glyph is generally set a little higher, so as to be level with the plus sign.

In informal usage, the hyphen-minus (), provided as standard on most keyboards, is often used instead of the figure dash.

In TeX, the standard fonts have no figure dash; however, the digits normally all have the same width as the en dash, so an en dash can be substituted. In XeLaTeX, one can use \char"2012. The Linux Libertine font also has the figure dash glyph.

En dash

The en dash, en rule, or nut dash is traditionally half the width of an em dash.
In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, and the en dash is often more than half the width of the em dash. The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M, respectively,
and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters.

Usage

The three main uses of the en dash are
# to connect symmetric items, such as the two ends of a range or two competitors or alternatives
# as a substitute for a hyphen in a compound when one of the connected items is more complex than a single word
# as an interruptor at sentence level, substituting for a pair of commas, parentheses, or to indicate a rhetorical pause. It is usually held that, when used as an interruptor, the en dash should be "open"spaced on both sidesin contrast to the em dash, which is usually closed; a common exception is in newspapers.

Ranges of values

The en dash is commonly used to indicate a closed range of valuesa range with clearly defined and finite upper and lower boundariesroughly signifying what might otherwise be communicated by the word "through" in American English, or "to" in International English. This may include ranges such as those between dates, times, or numbers. Various style guides restrict this range indication style to only parenthetical or tabular matter, requiring "to" or "through" in running text. Preference for hyphen vs. en dash in ranges varies. For example, the APA style (named after the American Psychological Association) uses an en dash in ranges, but the AMA style (named after the American Medical Association) uses a hyphen:

Some style guides (including the ''Guide for the Use of the International System of Units ( SI)'' and the '' AMA Manual of Style'') recommend that, when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, the word "to" should be used instead of an en dash. For example, "a voltage of 50 V to 100 V" is preferable to using "a voltage of 50–100 V". Relatedly, in ranges that include negative numbers, "to" is used to avoid ambiguity or awkwardness (for example, "temperatures ranged from −18°C to −34°C"). It is also considered poor style (best avoided) to use the en dash in place of the words "to" or "and" in phrases that follow the forms ''from X to Y'' and ''between X and Y''.

Relationships and connections

The en dash is used to contrast values or illustrate a relationship between two things. Examples of this usage include:
* Australia beat American Samoa 31–0.
* Radical–Unionist coalition
* Boston–Hartford route
* New York–London flight (however, it may be argued that ''New York–to-London flight'' is more appropriate because New York is a single name composed of two valid words; with a single en dash, the phrase is ambiguous and could mean either ''Flight from New York to London'' or ''New flight from York to London''; such ambiguity is assuaged when used mid-sentence, though, because of the capital N in "New" indicating it is a special noun). If dash–hyphen use becomes too unwieldy or difficult to understand, the sentence can be rephrased for clarity and readability; for example, "The flight from New York to London was a pleasant experience".
* Mother–daughter relationship
* The Supreme Court voted 5–4 to uphold the decision.

A distinction is often made between "simple" attributive compounds (written with a hyphen) and other subtypes (written with an en dash); at least one authority considers name pairs, where the paired elements carry equal weight, as in the Taft–Hartley Act to be "simple", while others consider an en dash appropriate in instances such as these to represent the parallel relationship, as in the McCain–Feingold bill or Bose–Einstein statistics. When an act of the U.S. Congress is named using the surnames of the senator and representative who sponsored it, the hyphen-minus is used in the short title; thus, the short title of Public Law 111–203 is "The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act", with a hyphen-minus rather than an en dash between "Dodd" and "Frank". However, there is a difference between something named for a parallel/coordinate relationship between two people for example, Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein and something named for a single person who had a compound surname, which may be written with a hyphen or a space but not an en dashfor example, the Lennard-Jones potential yphenis named after one person ( John Lennard-Jones), as are Bence Jones proteins and Hughlings Jackson syndrome. Copyeditors use dictionaries (general, medical, biographical, and geographical) to confirm the eponymity (and thus the styling) for specific terms, given that no one can know them all offhand.

Preference for an en dash instead of a hyphen in these coordinate/relationship/connection types of terms is a matter of style, not inherent orthographic "correctness"; both are equally "correct", and each is the preferred style in some style guides. For example, '' the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', the '' AMA Manual of Style'', and Dorland's medical reference works use hyphens, not en dashes, in coordinate terms (such as " blood-brain barrier"), in eponyms (such as " Cheyne-Stokes respiration", " Kaplan-Meier method"), and so on.

Attributive compounds

In English, the en dash is usually used instead of a hyphen in compound (phrasal) attributives in which one or both elements is itself a compound, especially when the compound element is an open compound, meaning it is not itself hyphenated. This manner of usage may include such examples as:
* The hospital–nursing ho