What’s the Difference Between Em Dash, En Dash, and Hyphen? - How-To Geek
In the world of typography, a humble horizontal line can mean at least seven different things depending on its length and the context in which it gets used.As we mentioned above, each type of dash, hyphen, or minus sign has its own special length, and each also gets its own Unicode character.As if that weren’t enough, there are other horizontal line Unicode characters, such as underscore (_), macron (¯), and overline (‾)—all of which can be used in different contexts to mean different things.Instead, “dash” is a term that encompasses multiple punctuation marks like the en dash and em dash.
So informally, you can say “dash” and mean either en dash or em dash, but if you want to type a dash, you have to pick one of the specific types of dashes.