To the average person there doesn’t appear to be much difference between a minus sign and a hyphen and a dash. But to the trained professional not only are there differences between these three, there are several flavors of each.

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Some people use a dash in their email address.

Or are they using a hyphen?

A dash is so called because starting around 1552 it was at first the written equivalent of a violent blow. Now you can choose from en-dash and em-dash so called because an en-dash is supposed to be as wide as an “n” and an em-dash as wide as an “m.”

On our keyboards what we usually get is an en-dash and we use this quite insensitively to represent a minus sign.

A minus sign has quite a different history.

The first appearance of a minus sign in English seems to have been back 1483 and we seem  to have gotten the concept from German merchants who used the symbol along with the plus sign to keep track of their goods.

You already know when to use a minus sign but according to the best sources there are times when you should use a dash and not a hyphen and other times when you should use a hyphen and not a dash.

Evidently a dash is a more casual piece of punctuation and you can throw it in when you are feeling less buttoned down than a colon might imply.

A hyphen is a little more formal so you shouldn’t get the two confused.

But since they look the same, and they use the same key on the keyboard I admit it’s hard not to get the two confused.

As to why a hyphen is called a hyphen that goes back to Greek.

You can sort of tell it might be Greek because hyphen is spelled h-y-p-h-e-n instead of h-i-f-e-n.

The word made the leap into English in the early 1600s because Greek and Latin scholars were using it.  It didn’t come from Greek directly though because those scholars sometimes tended to smear one classical language into another so it seems to have been a late Latin word as well.

But the Greeks used hyphens, just as we do, to show when two words should be treated as if they were one; like self-sufficient.

The Greek meaning of the word hyphen is  “in one” and so it makes sense that we would treat two words as one when they are joined by a hyphen.

But that’s the figurative meaning, not the literal meaning.

The hyp part of hyphen is related to the hyp part of hypodermic which means “under the skin.” So the literal meaning of hyphen is “under one” and when the Greeks used a hyphen they didn’t draw a little dash between the two words they were joining.  Instead, they drew a little smile-shaped curve under the two words to show that they were joined.

But if you think that hyphens, minus signs and dashes are confusing, just think of how messed up Charles Daubney must have been when in 1850 he was thinking about the “joining” meaning of hyphen and so used the word hyphen to refer to what you and I would call a plus sign.