hyphenminus

Hyphen-minus is the character at Unicode code point U+002D, named HYPHEN-MINUS. It is the most common character used to represent a hyphen in plain ASCII text and also functions as the minus sign in many programming languages. In the ASCII and Unicode standards it has the decimal value 45.

Although visually a short dash, hyphen-minus is not always typographically correct for all uses. It is a generic punctuation mark with the general category Punctuation, Dash (Pd). It is often used as both hyphen in words (e.g., well-being) and as the subtraction operator, which can lead to typographic and locale inconsistencies. It is distinct from the minus sign U+2212, which is a mathematical symbol and has the general category Symbol, Math (Sm).

Historically, it arose as a compromise in ASCII between a hyphen and a minus sign to minimize character sets in early computing. In many fonts the hyphen-minus and the mathematical minus sign share the same glyph, increasing confusion in digital typography. In proper typography, hyphen is U+2010 HYPHEN, non-breaking hyphen U+2011, and the minus sign is U+2212; dashes such as en dash U+2013 and em dash U+2014 are used for ranges and punctuation.

Practical guidance: in text composition, use hyphen-minus only where a hyphen is intended; for typographic dash needs, prefer U+2010 or U+2011; for negative numbers or mathematical subtraction, prefer U+2212 minus sign; in programming and data, hyphen-minus remains standard as the required ASCII character. In domain names and filenames, it is commonly used as a separator.