dash

Computing and everyday typing stretch the word to cover shorter marks: the hyphen that joins compound words and the minus sign of subtraction. A typographer keeps these apart from the true dashes, which are longer and do different work. In careful editing, a compound adjective takes a hyphen, not a dash. In technical instructions, though, "dash" may simply mean the short stroke you type.

Telegraphy took over the printer's word, because the long signal, written out, looks like a short horizontal stroke. A dash conventionally lasts three times as long as a dot. Letters and numerals are spelled as ordered runs of the two signals, which is why the pair is so often spoken of together as "dots and dashes."

Water is the plainest case. In James Thomson's The Seasons a cascade falls white-dashing, with the verb used without an object for spray breaking downward. Its usual frame is dashed with, and what gets scattered can be anything: Tennyson's day dashed with isles of night, or Addison and Steele dashing a character with telling circumstances. Unlike the adulterating sense, it adds touches without implying the mixture is spoiled.

The verb's destructive core is usually built with a preposition: one dashes something against or upon a hard surface. In Thoreau, waves dash against the rocks. Two set phrases carry it into violence: dash someone's brains out, from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and dashed to death. Here the force lies in the impact. The plain "throw" sense stops before anything breaks.

Hopes and dreams are its usual objects, and it nearly always appears in the passive: "her hopes were dashed," "Arsenal's hopes… were dashed." The image of something fragile broken against a hard surface comes from the literal smashing sense. You can dash someone's plans, but the "hopes were dashed" frame is so fixed that it reads almost as an idiom.

The oldest idea in the word lives here. Middle English daschen came from Danish daske, "to slap, strike," which is related to Swedish daska, "to smack, spank." Further back, the origin is obscure. The noun for a blow keeps company with whack, knock and thwack. The verbs for smashing against something and throwing hard carry the same force.

A clipping of dashboard that moved from the car to the screen, the same shortening as the vehicle's dashboard. It nearly always takes a possessive and a word of place: something turns up on your dash, a dash is filled with selfies, gifs are all over my dash. That phrasing treats the feed as a surface you scan. It belongs to casual posting talk, not formal writing.

This is a spoken name for a written mark. British and Indian speakers read x′ aloud as "x dash," although the symbol's own name is prime. On paper it is still the small raised stroke ′ after a letter or number, not the horizontal punctuation mark. The word changes only when the mathematics is read out.

The mark that printers once set in place of a taboo word, as in d——, came to be spoken as a word in its own right. Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853) has "what the dash is that to you!" Lord Robert Gower asks "who the dash is this person." It fills the slot that devil would take, much like deuce, and now sounds distinctly dated.

The oath takes whatever annoys the speaker as its object: dash his impudence, dash these delays, dash it all. It fits exactly where damn would go, which is why it sounds safely mild and now rather old-fashioned. The same softening produced the "what the dash" noun, and on its own, Dash! works as an exclamation.

A dated trade word, built on the pattern of dashing one thing with another: to dash wine with water. The added material is always the cheaper one, so the verb implies cheating rather than simple mixing. Its old synonym sophisticate meant the same thing. In older texts, read dashed brandy as watered-down brandy, not merely flavored brandy.

West African English, as spoken in Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, gives the noun a range that no single English word covers. A dash may go to a porter, a beggar, a chief, a father-in-law or an official. George Billy Nii Ayittey's Africa Betrayed (1992) warns against reading the old custom of gifts to chiefs as a cultural excuse for bribery. The word counts like any noun: a dash, several dashes.