Dash

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.

Typical uses of dashes are to mark a break in a sentence, to set off an explanatory remark (similar to parenthesis), or to show spans of time or ranges of values.

The em dash is sometimes used as a leading character to identify the source of a quoted text. Provided by Wikipedia