U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS

U+002D was added to Unicode in version 1.1. It belongs to the block Basic Latin in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Dash Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as hyphen or minus sign.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Narrow East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as European Separator and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 10 other glyphs. In text U+002D behaves as Hyphen regarding line breaks. It has type SContinue for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The hyphen-minus ( - ) is a character used in digital documents and computing to represent a hyphen ( ‐ ) or a minus sign ( − ) . It is present in Unicode as code point U+002D - hyphen-minus; it is also in ASCII with the same value.

The use of one character for hyphen and minus, and sometimes also for en dash, was a compromise made in the early days of fixed-width typewriters and computer displays. However, in proper typesetting and graphic design, there are distinct characters for hyphens, dashes, and the minus sign. Usage of the hyphen-minus nonetheless persists in many contexts, as it is well-known, easy to enter on keyboards, and in the same location in all common character sets.

Most programming languages, restricting themselves to ASCII, use the hyphen-minus, rather than the Unicode character U+2212 − minus sign, for denoting subtraction and negative numbers.

Commonly, an em dash is represented by two hyphen-minus signs in succession, or even three in TeX markup.