In the overwhelming majority of fonts, it’s not a minus sign, as you can see from it being vertically positioned in the middle of a lowercase n instead of in th

In the overwhelming majority of fonts, it’s not a minus sign, as you can see from it being vertically positioned in the middle of a lowercase n instead of in the middle of a lining digit, like the plus sign is. (Neither is it a dash, being both too short and too thick.) It’s a weird hybrid of a hyphen and a minus that was introduced on typewriters to save a key and the accompanying mechanics. (For the same reason and with about as much respect for typography, many of them neglected to have numerals 0 and 1 separate from the Latin capital letters O and I.) Unicode, unlike typewriters and ASCII, but following half a millenium of book printing tradition, encodes a hyphen and a minus separately. (Also a number of dashes, though perhaps fewer than medieval printers used.) The weird thing it resorts to calling HYPHEN-MINUS also has to be encoded and will probably persist in computer code (including Unix program arguments) forever, but in texts targeted at humans it has no place. The inadequacy of your (and my) keyboard is regrettable, but doesn’t really make for a great argument here.