If you’ve ever found yourself confused about the difference between a dash and a hyphen, and when to use a hyphen, you’re far from alone. When you handwrite them, they probably look exactly the same.

It seems we're always declaring our great fondness for this punctuation mark or that one. Oh, the whimsical nature of the semicolon and how smart she makes us feel. Oh, the gorgeous curves of the ...

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited ...