Double Hyphen on:  
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In
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
, the double hyphen is a
punctuation mark
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisti ...
that consists of two parallel
hyphen
The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation.
The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...
s (). It was a development of the earlier , which developed from a
Central Europe
Central Europe is a geographical region of Europe between Eastern Europe, Eastern, Southern Europe, Southern, Western Europe, Western and Northern Europe, Northern Europe. Central Europe is known for its cultural diversity; however, countries in ...
an variant of the
virgule slash, originally a form of
scratch comma. Similar marks (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
*Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
* Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
* Fred Belo ...
) are used in other scripts.
In order to avoid it being confused with the
equals sign
The equals sign (British English) or equal sign (American English), also known as the equality sign, is the mathematical symbol , which is used to indicate equality. In an equation it is placed between two expressions that have the same valu ...
, the double hyphen is often shown as a double oblique hyphen in modern typography. The double hyphen is also not to be confused with
two consecutive hyphens (-
em dash
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...
or
en dash
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...
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
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...
s, such as
Fraktur
Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly vis ...
faces, use the double hyphen as a
glyph
A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...
ic variant 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
Merriam-Webster, Incorporated is an list of companies of the United States by state, American company that publishes reference work, reference books and is mostly known for Webster's Dictionary, its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary pub ...
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
''The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia'' is one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. It was compared favorably with the ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' and frequently consulted for more factual information than woul ...
and
Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language.
* It is used by
Coptic language
Coptic () is a dormant language, dormant Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language. It is a group of closely related Egyptian dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Ancient Egyptian language, Egyptian language, and histori ...
scholars to denote the form of the verb used before
pronominal
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...
suffixes, e.g. ⲕⲟⲧ⸗ ''kot⹀'' 'to build'.
*It is used by scholars of the
Hittite language
Hittite (, or ), also known as Nesite (Nešite/Neshite, Nessite), is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern ...
to separate
clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s from the word to which they attach; this usage has been adopted by the
Leipzig Glossing Rules.
* It is used as a distinct punctuation mark in
Ojibwe language
Ojibwe ( ), also known as Ojibwa ( ), Ojibway, Otchipwe,R. R. Bishop Baraga, 1878''A Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language''/ref> Ojibwemowin, or Anishinaabemowin, is an Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous la ...
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
In computing and typesetting, a soft hyphen (Unicode ) or syllable hyphen, is a code point reserved in some coded character sets for the purpose of breaking words across lines by inserting visible hyphens if they fall on the line end but remain i ...
. However, due to lack of availability of a double hyphen in most fonts, an equal sign is often used as a substitute.
* In Ojibwe,
Cree
The Cree, or nehinaw (, ), are a Indigenous peoples of the Americas, North American Indigenous people, numbering more than 350,000 in Canada, where they form one of the country's largest First Nations in Canada, First Nations. They live prim ...
and other languages using
Unified Canadian syllabics, because final ''c'' () resembles a hyphen, a double hyphen () is used to distinguish the punctuation from the syllabics letter.
* In
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, the () in rare cases replaces an English en dash or hyphen when writing foreign words in
katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji).
The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...
due to their potential confusion with the
prolonged sound mark (). It may be used to separate a person's given and family names, such as transcribing the name of
Galileo Galilei
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( , , ) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a poly ...
as: ガリレオ゠ガリレイ. The
middle dot () is however much more commonly used for these purposes. (For foreign names that include both spaces and hyphens, both the middle dot and double hyphen may appear together as in
Catherine Zeta-Jones
Catherine Zeta-Jones (; born 25 September 1969) is a Welsh actress. Recognised for her versatility, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Tony Award. In 2010, she was appointed Comm ...
: キャサリン・ゼタ゠ジョーンズ.) The double hyphen is part of the
JIS X 0213
JIS X 0213 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining coded character sets for encoding the characters used in Japan. This standard extends JIS X 0208. The first version was published in 2000 and revised in 2004 (JIS2004) and 2012. As well as ad ...
standard, but is not included in more commonly used character encodings, such as
Shift-JIS
Shift JIS (also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS ...
and
EUC-JP
Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese (characters).
The most commonly used EUC codes are variable-length encodings with a character belonging to an compl ...
. For this reason, the equals sign is frequently used in its place.
* In
Volapük
Volapük (; , 'Language of the World', or lit. 'World Speak') is a constructed language created in 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God told him to create an international lang ...
the double oblique hyphen () has to be used instead of the simple hyphen () to cut a word at the end of a line or in the compound words.
Arie de Jong
Arie de Jong (; October 18, 1865, Jakarta, Dutch East Indies – October 12, 1958, Putten, Netherlands) was a Dutch enthusiast and reformer of the constructed language Volapük by Johann Martin Schleyer, with whose help the Volapük movement gain ...
, ''Gramat Volapüka'', Leiden, Brill, 1931, § 34.
Stylistic variant of the single hyphen
When the double hyphen is used as a functionally equivalent graphical variant (
allograph
In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious exa ...
) of the single hyphen, it has the same
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
code point
A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...
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
codepoint
A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dimensional (sheets in ...
s in Unicode:
See also
*
*
*
*
Double dash (disambiguation)
References
External links
* https://unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2647.pdf
* https://unicode.org/L2/L2011/11038-double-hyphen.pdf
{{DEFAULTSORT:Double Hyphen
Punctuation
Typographical symbols