Gdashd

Here is an explanation by Dr. Richard A. Cohen of why he hyphenates God's name into "G-d." I am including two paragraphs of his explanation, although the first is only for fun. I will be very impressed by anyone who can understand that first paragraph in only one reading.

The only other academic book I can remember seeing use "G-d" is Louis Feldman's Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World.

Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: 1994), p. xv:

With the term "G-d," capital "G" intact, "centered" on a dash which is not a sign, transcendence goes farther. The term harks back to a past too old, and heralds a future too distant, for the elasticity of ecstatic contemporaneity, within which contemporary thought plays. Higher than differance and being-crossed-out, the name "G-d" does not signify its signified in a straightforward or oblique correspondence, or through a coherence, whether synchronic or diachronic or both, or through a correspondence and coherence delayed, deferred, or derailed. It leaves correspondence and coherence behind, or rather beneath, drawing them upward in its train, reaching higher, disturbing, giving pause, imposing too much, tracing what is already gone andnot yet come, and as responsibility and obligation is both irreducibly present and beyond at once.

In this word-name-signal "G-d," indicated by a dash and capital G, there is a transcendence that transcends absolutely (holiness) and at the same time, as the sense we must make of this transcending movement, there is a transcendence that transcends ethically. They are one and the same upward movement, toward that which we cannot signify or know, but what, beyond contemplation, we are compelled to do, the good. One could write the name "G-d" as "G/d," with a diagonal slash rather than a horizontal dash, indicating the upward movement of moral rectitude, the ethical asymmetry Levinas names "one-for-the-other," being-for-the-other before being-for-oneself, which is how the movement which bursts through the name "G-d" signifies for human beings -- "G-d who comes to the idea."

In short, the dash is supposed to signify that God transcends this world. I kind of like the idea of "G/d" signifying God's being above this world.