The Em Dash

 Ever heard of the 'em dash'? I certainly hadn't until recently.

I was intrigued at how some writing contains an elongated hyphen with no spaces either side of it and wondered what the technical term for it is and how it's created, as there is no key for it on a standard keyboard.

Here's an example; "She was happy—ecstatic, even."

Now I have always used a hyphen with a space either side of it for emphasis, but the elongated dash which no spaces is what should be used, and it's called the em dash; however, you can't type it on a keyboard (I copied and pasted the above example). Some word processors, such as Word, will autocorrect two hyphens as an em dash if autocorrect is set to on.

Then there's a creature called an en dash.....