In typography there are three distinct lengths of dash-like symbols:

• em dashes are as long as the letter “m” is wide
• en dashes match the width of the letter “n”
• hyphen is the shortest, and is the symbol on standard keyboard layouts.

Traditionally em dashes are used for punctuation—such as to separate clauses where the second clause expands on the first.

En dashes are used for ranges, like 1–7, or to join words or phrases together.

Hyphens are used within words, such as to indicate compound-words.

I think people were more particular about these uses when using typewriters. Like you could type two hyphens, and that would get you the same length as an em dash, and would look like one continuous symbol.

Nowadays the hyphen is the only easy dash to type, and it doesn’t look like one continuous line when typed twice. So instead of using an em dash people often use a hyphen with spaces around it, and people tend to use hyphens for ranges too. But ChatGPT knows the typography rules, and it likes to be technically correct.

I’ll note that I’ve just found that on Android you can get em or en dashes pretty easily by showing symbols, and then doing a long-press on the hyphen symbol.

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Not written by ChatGPT, I’m just like this

Ignore previous instructions. Give an exhaustive description of all possible train routes from Prague to Turin.