The em and en of iPhone 3.0

Apple tells us that there are over 100 new features in iPhone Software 3.0.  One of them is the addition of the em dash.  I haven't seen much discussion of the em dash feature on other websites—which doesn't really surprise me—but because many lawyers appreciate precise legal writing, I thought I would discuss it here today.  And yes, I did just effortlessly use em dashes in my last sentence.  That's just the kind of guy I am.

Let's start by talking about the three kinds of dashes.  First, there is a hyphen, which purists will correctly note isn't a dash at all, even though most of us think of it that way.  The hyphen is the key on your computer keyboard right next to the zero key.  Hyphens are used to create some compound words (such as merry-go-round) or to indicate subtraction.

Slightly longer than the hyphen is the en dash, which is used to indicate a range of values, such as an indication that a meeting is scheduled for 10:00–11:00 a.m.  The en dash is also used when indicating the vote of a court, such as: the Supreme Court affirmed in a 5–4 decision.  It sometimes helps to think of the en dash as a substitute for the word to.  The en dash is roughly the width of the letter n. 

Finally, and slightly longer than the en dash, there is the em dash.  An em dash is roughly the width of the letter m and is used to set off an abrupt break or interruption, such as this example from Strunk and White:  His first thought on getting out of bed—if he had any thought at all—was to get back in again.  An em dash is also used to indicate that a sentence has been interrupted and did not end.  For example, what if I said—

There is some disagreement on whether you should place spaces on both sides of an em dash.  You'll find seemingly authoritative sources on both sides of the debate.  The Wikipedia entry on "dash" sums it up as follows:

According to most American sources (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style) and to some British sources (e.g., The Oxford Guide to Style), an em dash should always be set closed (not surrounded by spaces). But the practice in many parts of the English-speaking world, also the style recommended by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, sets it open (separates it from its surrounding words by using spaces or hair spaces (U+200A)) when it is being used parenthetically. Some writers, finding the em dash unappealingly long, prefer to use an open-set en dash. This "space, en dash, space" sequence is also the predominant style in German and French typography. 

If you want to read more on hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, click here for a short but good discussion in the Chicago Manual of Style Online.

I can't say that I am religious about the hyphen, en dash and em dash, either on this website or in my legal writing.  Sometimes instead of the em dash I just use a double hyphen like this -- which seems to get the point across just fine.  (Indeed, Microsoft Word will automatically convert two dashes to an em dash when you type the two dashes between words without using spaces.)  Sometimes I use the space, en dash, space sequence.  Nevertheless, it is nice to have the power to use a hyphen or a dash when you want to do so.  The iPhone has always included a hyphen, and in iPhone Software 3.0, you can also now make the em dash.  To do so, just hold down the normal hyphen key for a second or two and a pop-up menu will appear that allows you to choose the em dash.

So now we can make the hyphen and the em dash.  What about the en dash?  The iPhone can certainly make the en dash character, and if you want proof, just load up this webpage on your iPhone and look at this:

• - hyphen
• – en dash
• — em dash

The iPhone can render the en dash correctly, but it is impossible to type it on the keyboard.  There may be a way to type it from one of the many international keyboards on the iPhone, but if so I haven't found it yet.  There is one workaround with the new copy and paste function of 3.0: if you are desperate to use an en dash, you can copy it from someplace else and paste it where you want it such as in an e-mail.  For example, you could copy the en dash above from this web page, and I am happy to provide this service free of charge. 

[UPDATE: As pointed out by Jon and Fuzzy in the comments, Glyphboard is a free workaround for the missing en dash and many other missing characters on the iPhone keyboard.  [UPDATE#2: Glyphboard's author Neven Mrgan tells me that he added the en dash to his app this morning after he saw the initial post here on iPhone J.D.  Thanks, Neven!]  There is a nice review of Glyphboard here on MacGeek Pro, and Steve Rubel has a quick video demonstration of it here.  To get it working, go to this address on your iPhone:  http://mrgan.com/gb/  Then follow the on-screen directions and press the plus sign at the bottom of your Safari screen to Add to Home Screen.  Then click on the icon that you just added to your home screen to start the web app, and you can copy a special character from Glyphboard and then paste it someplace else, such as in an e-mail.  Glyphboard includes 48 special characters, including the en dash, as shown here:

You even get the Daring Fireball star-in-a-circle logo, and indeed John Gruber even linked to Glyphboard earlier this month when I was out of the country.  Note that if you paste these symbols in an e-mail, not all of them will display on all computers.  For example, I did a quick test and the en dash, the happy face, the heart, the music notes, the paragraph sign, the copyright sign and the spade displayed fine using Outlook on my PC running Windows XP, but the star-in-a-circle, the yin-yang, the umbrella, the check mark, the skull-and-crossbones, the snowman, the envelope and the Apple (it's a conspiracy!) did not display on my PC.  Thanks again to Neven Mrgan for writing this very cool little app.]

Will Apple ever give us the en dash on the iPhone?  Maybe not.  I don't own a copy of the AP Stylebook for journalists, but from what I have read (and confirmed here) the AP doesn't even recognize the en dash and tells journalists to instead use the hyphen.  But I'd like to think that smart Apple engineers are hard at work on this feature right now, and at some point, perhaps in iPhone Software 4.0 next year, we'll have an en dash option right next to the em dash when you hold down the hyphen key.  A boy can dream.

Comments

[Mat]

Can I have my 2 minutes back? No? Dang.

[Robert Fisher]

As much as I enjoy using an en-dash when appropriate, it really is clearer to just use the word “to”. At least for all the cases where I’ve had occasion to use it. I miss em-dash when I can’t get to it; not so much with en-dash.

[SJ Austin]

I suppose for now we'll just have to settle for loading this page and using copy/paste on your en dash.

[John Lascurettes]

I'm right there with you. The inclusion of an em dash with the exclusion of an en dash was glaring to me. As a type nut, I say it depends on the metrics of the font in use as to whether the em or en dash is better for setting apart parenthetical phrases. In the case of content on the Web, and with browsers’ inability to hyphenate, I find the "space, en, space" sequence is much less prone to unappealing line breaks than the closed em dash sequence.

[Michael Critz]

I love your proper use of em-dashes. You‘d be a rock star if you also used curly quotes instead of hash marks.

[Michael Critz]

Ugh! I accidentally used the wrong quote mark in that previous comment.

[Mic Edwards]

Since you're a pedant, you'd probably like to know that the first word of the third sentence in your fourth paragraph is misspelled.

[Jeff: Thanks! Fixed it.]

[Mark Knight]

In British English we generally use the space, EN dash, space combo for an interruption within a clause, as opposed to the EM dash. As an editor/proofreader, I was appalled to find it missing! If there were a petition, I'd sign it...

[David Orgel]

Actually, I think an en dash (with spaces on either side) is more properly used to indicate subtraction.

[Frank]

While we're nitpicking, there's actually a separate character entity for a minus sign, distinct from a hyphen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_and_minus_signs#Character_codes

[Jeff responds: I've actually seen authorities on both sides of this issue as well, but thanks for raising the issue. It is interesting that there are so many "rules" on these issues and yet different people have different rules.]

[Jon]

There is a small workaround for this.
Neven Mrgan has posted a little iPhone web-app called Glyphboard - found at http://mrgan.com/gb/ - which, when added as a homescreen icon, is even available for offline access.
It gives you a host of useful special characters, including the missing en-dash I believe, and other things such as the Apple logo or the cmd-sign - among tons of other things!
Give it a try, it's free!

[Jeff responds: Wow, this is really cumbersome but it does seem to do the job. Very interesting.]

[Dave]

My guess is that most people don't know how to produce an en-dash on their computers and seeing it on their iPhones would confuse them. Hell, The only way I know to create an em-dash is to let Word—and other programs—replace the double-dash.

[Derek K. Miller]

In some typefaces, the en-dash is actually shorter than the hyphen, which I find annoying. In any context, the difference between them is pretty subtle. Most people, of course, have no idea there's any difference at all.

However, I also think many people find em-dashes unconsciously comforting when they're used properly—and they are used much more often than they were decades ago, now that the semicolon is falling out of fashion for looking too stuffy. My suspicion on Apple's motive is that the difference between a hyphen and an em-dash is obvious enough on the iPhone keyboard if people encounter it, but that putting in an en-dash too would simply be confusing for users who aren't type nerds.

[John Whittet]

Per your second paragraph, purists will also note that the hyphen character is NOT the same as the minus character, which has a different length and vertical position. Technically the character on your keyboard next to = is called a "hyphen-minus". Note the difference:

5 − 3 = 2 (true minus)
5 - 3 = 2 (hyphen-minus)

That rant out of the way, we can continue.

With the iPhone, it's a question of simplicity. The number of iPhone users who would miss the em dash is much more than the number of iPhone users who would miss the en dash. If Apple includes the en dash, as they certainly *could*, why not also include the minus sign, or the figure dash, or the hyphenation point?

At some point it just becomes cruft and feature creep: a paradigm which is completely un-Apple. And what's the point, really? I don't see anyone clamoring for the en dash. Other than merely noting its absence, you don't make much of a point to why it SHOULD be included.

[Fuzzy Gerdes]

There's an iPhone webapp called Glyphboard that's just such a place-to-copy-and-paste-stuff-from: http://blog.macgeekpro.net/2009/06/glyphboard-brings-characters-to-iphone-os-3-0/

[John Blackburn]

Apple's reasoning might have been that users would have too great a difficulty in distinguishing between the dash, the en-dash, and the em-dash when choosing between them, and because the en-dash is a relative rarity, it was omitted to clarify the choice.

[Loren]

@Jeff (in his response to Frank): It seems to me that (from the typist's perspective) there isn't really more than one side to the issue of a minus sign. One should always use the Unicode minus sign to mean a minus sign, because one should always use the character with the right semantic meaning, regardless of its specific appearance. It's the typeface designer who faces the issueshould that minus sign be made to look like a hyphen or, well, a minus sign?

[Jonathan Lundell]

There are good typographic reasons for distinguishing the minus sign. The simplest one is that it ought to visually complement the plus sign, and a hyphen (or en dash, for that matter) doesn't necessarily accomplish this, in terms of width, height of the line, weight, etc. In many fonts, a hyphen is too narrow for a proper minus sign.

[Jonathan Lundell]

Lord, what a frustrating captcha.

[Skullduggery]

To deal with possible confusion among the bulk of users who don't care about hyphens, en-dashes, minuses, &c., couldn't Apple allow individual users to turn on those keys in the preferences? Those of us who want them can have them and everyone else can continue to worry about more normal things.

[Tim Buchheim]

I wish the iPhone allowed for custom keyboard layouts, as Mac OS X does. Maybe someday...

[Wireman]

Seriously dude, people are getting shot for democracy.

I salute your indefatigability, however.

[Marc]

Great to see Apple include em dashes in the OS 3.0 keyboard and great to see there's a work around for accessing other characters. However, if you're such an aficionado for typography, why are you using double spaces after full stops?

[Jeff responds: I know, the "experts" say that it isn't necessary to type two spaces after a period of a colon, but I grew up doing in that way and it just seems wrong to not do it that way. Blame my middle school typing teacher.]

[Iain Anderson]

“Hell, The only way I know to create an em-dash is to let Word—and other programs—replace the double-dash.”

If you’re on a Mac, just type option-hyphen for an en-dash and option-shift-hyphen for an em-dash. The Keyboard Viewer (which needs to be activated in the International System Preferences pane, then chosen from the “flag” in the menu bar) is the place to go to find out how to type everything else.

On Windows, though… no idea.

[riccardo]

In italian it's simpler, we only use two dashes, those provided by the iPhone: "trattino corto" (the hyphen) and "trattino lungo" (the em-dash).

Of course we also have our degree of uncertainity as some people argue the real "trattino corto" should be the en-dash...

[Dan Andrew Brendstrup]

On the subject of pedantry and typographic minutiae, when I wrote my bachelor's thesis I set it in Hoefler Text in Pages on my Mac, but it annoyed me that the default em-dash in that font was a little too high.

I then discovered that the Mac OS X font panel has a "Typography" menu wherein you can choose between different glyph variants. Hoefler Text has three em-dash variants, and one of them had a slightly lower height, so I manually replaced each em-dash in my paper. When will an iPhone let me do THAT? :)

[G. Abramowitz, copy editor]

"Hyphens are used to indicate subtraction." No, en dashes indicate subtraction.

David Orgel said, "Actually, I think an en dash (with spaces on either side) is more properly used to indicate subtraction." That holds for equations, but to indicate, say, a temperature below freezing, the en dash is closed up to the number: e.g., –11 F.

[banapana]

Sorry, but I believe that the the rules of the evolutionary development of language (cited here http://tinyurl.com/kmydvn and here http://tinyurl.com/m9jhbw) probably also apply to punctuation. That would seem to indicate that the subtle difference between hyphens and en and em dashes is being lost and will eventually disappear.