human
I have a question about the difference between a hyphen and a dash. Can you help me out?
assistant
I can certainly try! A hyphen is a punctuation mark that connects two words or parts of words, while a dash is a punctuation mark that indicates a break in thought within a sentence. For example, if you were to say "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", then the word 'brown' would be connected by a hyphen because it's part of the phrase "quick brown fox". However, if you wanted to say "the quick-brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", then you'd use a dash because the word 'quick' is a complete phrase on its own.