Double hyphen
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In
scratch comma. Similar marks (see below
) are used in other scripts.
In order to avoid it being confused with the
em dash — or en dash
– due to the limitations of typewriters and keyboards that do not have distinct hyphen and dash keys.
Usage
The double hyphen is used for several different purposes throughout the world:
- Some Fraktur faces, use the double hyphen as a glyphicvariant of the single hyphen. (With Fraktur faces, such a double hyphen is usually oblique.)
- It may be also used for artistic or commercial purposes to achieve a distinctive visual effect. For example, the name of The Waldorf⹀Astoria hotel was officially written with a double hyphen from 1949 to 2009.
- In Merriam-Webster dictionaries if a word is divided at the end of the line, and the division point happens to be a hyphen, it is replaced with a double hyphen to graphically indicate that the divided word is normally hyphenated, for example cross⸗
country. - In several dictionaries published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all such compound words are linked with double hyphens, whether at the end of the line or not, and the normal use of the single hyphen for non-compound words is retained. An example from the first or second page of such dictionaries is Aaron's⸗rod. Examples include the Century Dictionary and Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language.
- It is used by Coptic language scholars to denote the form of the verb used before pronominal suffixes, e.g. ⲕⲟⲧ⸗ kot⹀ 'to build'.
- It is used by scholars of the Leipzig Glossing Rules.
- It is used as a distinct punctuation mark in Ojibwe language publications in the Fiero Roman orthography, as a hyphen is used to separate compound preverb units regardless of their line position, while a double hyphen is used to divide a word at the end of a line and can be treated as a soft hyphen. However, due to lack of availability of a double hyphen in most fonts, an equal sign is often used as a substitute.
- In Ojibwe, Unified Canadian syllabics, because final c (U+1428 ᐨ CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL SHORT HORIZONTAL STROKE) resembles a hyphen, a double hyphen (U+1400 ᐀ CANADIAN SYLLABICS HYPHEN) is used to distinguish the punctuation from the syllabics letter.
- In EUC-JP. For this reason, the equals sign is frequently used in its place.
- In Volapük the double oblique hyphen (teilamalül) has to be used instead of the simple hyphen (yümamalül) to cut a word at the end of a line or in the compound words.[4]
Stylistic variant of the single hyphen
When the double hyphen is used as a functionally equivalent graphical variant (allograph) of the single hyphen, it has the same Unicode code point as a conventional hyphen (since how it is displayed/printed is a font choice on that occasion).
Similar marks
Other forms of double hyphen are given unique
codepoints
in Unicode:
| Name | Glyph | Code point | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| CANADIAN SYLLABICS HYPHEN | ᐀ | U+1400
|
Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics to distinguish a hyphen from U+1428 CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL SHORT HORIZONTAL STROKE ( ᐨ )
|
| DOUBLE OBLIQUE HYPHEN | ⸗ | U+2E17
|
Coptic and ancient Near Eastern language scholarship |
| DOUBLE HYPHEN | ⹀ | U+2E40
|
Generic (non-Asian) double hyphen |
| KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN | ゠ | U+30A0
|
Japanese and orthography (in Katakana or Hiragana script) |
| MODIFIER LETTER SHORT EQUALS SIGN | ꞊ | U+A78A
|
Used as a tone letter and also to mark clitics in interlinear glossing
|
See also
- U+2248 ≈ ALMOST EQUAL TO ()
- U+003D = EQUALS SIGN
- U+2550 ═ BOX DRAWINGS DOUBLE HORIZONTAL
- Double dash (disambiguation)
References
- ISBN 0-918986-58-3, p. 355. – Detail of the left border of the second column.
- ISBN 3-10-373505-7, p. 525. – Detail of the right border of the printed text.
- ^ "Double hyphen（ダブルハイフン）の意味 - goo国語辞書".
- ^ Arie de Jong, Gramat Volapüka, Leiden, Brill, 1931, § 34.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Double hyphens.