“A hyphen is a hyphen, and a dash is a dash,” says Bill Walsh. He doesn’t do en dashes, sorry.
But just in case you need to know, there is an easy keyboard shortcut for making an en dash.
How do you make an en dash on a Mac keyboard?
More after the jump.
We’ve already covered how to make an em dash on this blog before. An em dash is a dash that’s as wide as a capital M.
An en dash is a dash that’s as wide as a capital en. It is wider than a hyphen and smaller than an em dash. I don’t really want to bother with en dashes, just like Bill Walsh,copy chief of the Washington Post. What’s critical is to not confuse hyphens and em dashes.
But if you insist on knowing, how do you make an en dash using a keyboard shortcut on a Mac keyboard?
Do this on your Mac keyboard:
- Press option + hyphen
Good to know, right? After typing that, you should see the en dash on your screen.
This is an en dash: “–”
Click the following posts to see how to put a tilde on top of the n on Mac OS X.
Mac Mojo 
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I don’t really want to be taking typographic advice from a guy who doesn’t care for using an En dash, but this is useful info nonetheless. Thanks.
Thanks, I need to use en-dashes for thesis work! Turabian gets her panties in a bunch over the little things!
It’s going to be finish of mine day, except before end I am reading
this impressive post to increase my know-how.
Sorry, but the N dash and the hyphen looking exactly for this MacBook Air user.
It’s so much easier (and clearer) on an iOS device!
Sorry, but the N dash and the hyphen look exactly the same for this MacBook Air user.
It’s so much easier (and clearer) on an iOS device!