If you’ve ever found yourself confused about the difference between a dash and a hyphen, and when to use a hyphen, you’re far from alone. When you handwrite them, they probably look exactly the same.

Back when the somewhat irritating animated TV show Beavis and Butt-Head was popular, I can recall a copy editor in the newsroom uttering the memorable query, "Does Butt-Head have a hyphen?" It's no ...

Hyphens are only used to combine certain words together. They are not strong enough to set off phrases or words from a sentence. Use hyphens in the following situations: Use in compound numbers and ...

Russ in New Jersey had a question about hyphens: In "northwestern California landmark" should "northwestern California" be hyphenated? "I'm not sure if it's simply a matter of preference or if the ...

Hyphen defenders (or is it hyphen-defenders?), take heart. The Associated Press is reversing some of its March 2019 guidance on how we use the wedding band of the punctuation world. “Thanks to input ...

It’s a proven fact that as you get older you worry more about punctuation. Fussing about apostrophes and semicolons just comes with the territory. Thus, it’s no surprise that the other day our coffee ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen ...

In a move that addresses a long-standing complaint about its writing style, OpenAI has announced that its AI model, ChatGPT, will now comply with user instructions to avoid using em dashes. This ...

Back when the somewhat irritating animated TV show Beavis and Butt-Head was popular, I can recall a copy editor in the newsroom uttering the memorable query, "Does Butt-Head have a hyphen?" It's no ...