News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The... by xoxxala on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @05:50PM (#49999271)
I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names.

En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.

Re:Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The... by hunter2_ on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @11:43PM (#50001660)
Not unlike how in the trades, a tee is T-shaped, a wye is Y-shaped, a delta is Δ-shaped. Spelled-out letters aren't always geometric metaphors, but it's a thing.

Then you've got the first syllable of Ω (omega) being a homophone of Ohm, for what that's worth. From there we have ℧ (mho) for conductance... It's all quite clever. But I digress; I'll get back to emceeing and deejaying, cueing these elpees after a quick pee, okay?

Re:Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The... by notpushkin on Thursday October 08, 2026 @04:26AM (#50003219)
Different fonts use different lengths (sometimes en dash is the width of an uppercase “N” instead of lowercase, sometimes it’s half of the em dash which itself is `1em` which may or may not equal the width of the “M”...) But it’s a good way to remember that indeed, yeah!