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. Son-in-law is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (figure dash ‒, en dash –, em dash —, horizontal bar ―), which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign −, which is also longer and more vertically centred in some typefaces.