Understanding Hyphens and Dashes

An em dash when used for an aside or thought break, can also be created by using a normal n dash in this sequence:

The quick - brown fox (it does not do it in this text box but if you go WORD space dash space WORD space then as soon as you type the space after the word that immediately followed the en dash then it will become an em dash (I think from W2010 but certainly in 2016)

I would add a couple of points:

First, the optional hyphen is sometimes called a "soft hyphen" while the regular hyphen is called a "hard hyphen," defined as a hyphen that is visible wherever it appears on a line. Sometimes users mistakenly use the term to refer to the non-breaking hyphen.

Second, the en dash, padded with spaces, is generated automatically if you type a word, a space, a hyphen , another space, and another word. This is the British style for creating breaks in sentences between two separate thoughts. American newspapers use the padded en dash, too (in lieu of an closed-up em dash). It makes the narrow, fully justified newspaper columns easier to read. (Magazines usually don't do this because their columns are wider.) In most American manuscript styles, it's not correct to use the en dash this way.

James, I can definitely say that 0172 is NOT the optional hyphen but a logical symbol called the "Not sign". It will not be invisible and will actually print looking like that (¬). 0173 is called a "Soft hyphen" in the Symbol dialog box and seems to be both the optional and non-breaking hyphen. After doing some googling, I think that Word uses it's own "internal information" to tell it when to show this symbol and when to allow or not allow it to break at a line. So it may not be simple enough to just code in 0173; you will have to test it out to see which one Word treats it as. Let me know if you find out. My guess is 0173 is the non-breaking since inserting an invisible symbol isn't easy. You may be out of luck with the optional hyphen.

rpurosky: Thanks for the comments! So in summary:

regular hyphen "-" (0045)
en-dash "–" (0150)
em-dash "—" (0151)

I found the following 2 additional that may be the missing ones, but would appreciate validation:

optional hyphen? "¬" (0172)
non-breaking hyphen? "­­-" (0173)

James: Looks like the regular hyphen is character code 45 ASCII decimal. You can see that if you go to Insert, Symbol and highlight the character you're looking for. I know you meant 151 was "em-dash". To find and replace, just copy and paste both symbols involved in the Find what and Replace with boxes of the Find and Replace dialog.

Allen,

Thanks for the clear and helpful outline of the 5 types available of hyphen & dashes in Word (especially the hyphens!). However, 2 questions:

1) How can these be used with VBA (you gave the Ascii code for n-dash (0150) & n-dash (0151), but what about the hyphens?).

2) How to find/replace the different types of hyphens?

Regards!

Mistake from my tip: I meant "en dash" everywhere I typed "em dash". I always assumed it was an em dash, but just figured out an em dash is quite a bit longer and I may have never used one before. I liked this tip especially in that it forced me to realize there are 3 visibly different hyphen/dash lengths where I always assumed a regular hyphen and "en" dash were the same length. Not in Word!

I do know that the en dash will sometimes automatically appear (through AutoCorrect?) and replace a hyphen, but do not know every instance when this occurs. One instance for sure is if you type a hyphen after text and hit Enter to start a new paragraph. The hyphen visibly elongates to an em dash. I noticed a hyphen by itself on a line does not do this AutoCorrect; text has to be entered before the hyphen for this to occur.