Most fonts are equipped with at least two dashes: an en dash (–, –, which is the width of a lowercase “n”) and an em dash (—, —, which is the width of a lowercase “m”). Don’t confuse these with the hyphen (-), which isn’t a dash at all but a punctuation mark.
THE HYPHEN
Hyphens and dashes are confused to the point that they are now used almost interchangeably by some. Some fonts, such as Adobe Garamond Pro, retain hyphens in their original form; those hyphens look more like the diagonal stroke of a calligrapher’s pen than a straight horizontal line. You’ll also often see hyphens used as a replacement for a minus sign; however, a longer character is available in some fonts for this purpose.
Although the hyphen does look quite a bit like a dash or minus sign, it is a punctuation mark. It should be used primarily to hyphenate words in justified type. On the Web, this isn’t much of a concern because, as mentioned, there is no standard hyphenation control in browsers. The hyphen should also be used in compound modifiers (such as “fine-tuned”), to join digits in phone numbers, and in a few other rare cases (covered in detail on Wikipedia).
THE EN DASH AND THE EM DASH
In The Elements of Typographic Style – which is the unofficial bible of the modern typographer – Robert Bringhurst recommends that dashes in text should be the en dash flanked by two spaces. This is much less visually disruptive than using the em dash with no space—which is recommended in editorial style books such as The Chicago Manual of Style — because there is less tension between the dash and the characters on either side of it.
Why go against The Chicago Manual of Style in this case? The reason is that style manuals are concerned mostly with punctuation, not typography. An en dash surrounded by spaces achieves the same effect as an em dash with no spaces, but typographically it is less disruptive. This was a big debate between my editor and me when I was writing my book.
The practice of using two hyphens for a dash is a holdover from the days of typewriters. Besides being visually disruptive to smooth blocks of text, it is now unnecessary with the richer character sets that are available to typographers.
The en dash is also used to indicate ranges of numbers (such as “7–10 days”), although it isn’t flanked by spaces in this case.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/08/15/mind-your-en-and-em-dashes-typographic-etiquette/
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