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This is a hyphen (-). It has the same function as the symbol - (U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS, keyboard-hyphen). It comes in handy when an editor wishes to make explicit that they really do intend a hyphen, to discourage other editors from changing it to an en dash or other punctuation, or when using an explicit hyphen may cause technical issues, such as with the -{ wiki syntax for language converter. By allowing {{hyphen}} to be coded instead of -, it avoids objections to HTML escaping. (There does not seem to be a symbolic escape e.g. ‐.)