I have been using hyphen and dash exchangeably for a long time, and I thought they are the same. Until I realized there are: en-dash (–) em-dash (—) One is longer than the other, and both of them are longer than hyphen (-) (probably depends on which font you are using). I went through all this because there was an issue I investigated recently in kubernetes. The story Note: To simplify the context, the example below is faked with only the details that matter.