The Difference between a Dash and a Hyphen
rogersgeorge on October 24th, 2024
Dashes are longer than hyphens. The difference is hard to discern in this comic, but in the first panel, the text has a dash in “day—fresh” (or so it looks like to me) and a hyphen in “fresh-squeezed.” This is correct! The sentence means something like “on this hot summer day you get fresh-squeezed lemonade.” And the cartoonist used a break (which is what we use dashes for) instead of “you get.” If the sentence had had hyphens in both places, you’d have “day-fresh-lemonade,” (a compound adjective) which kind of doesn’t make sense.
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