Meanings of en-dash in English

However, there is no ASCII character for an en-dash, and we use the hyphen in these cases.

In typography, there are four standard types of dashes: the hyphen, the en-dash, the em-dash, and the three-em-dash.

For example, if you were printing "1830-1874", or "9:00-5:30", you would use an en-dash instead of a hyphen.

In typography, the en-dash is a little longer than the hyphen, and is typically used for duration, where you could substitute the word "to".

(HTML and some character sets do provide separate entities for en-dash and em-dash.)