One more question ... (UPDATED)

In addition to you wanting to keep some of the hyphens as is, I'm also seeing that the expansions include a wide variety of character strings/patterns, with little continuity.

The one pattern I do see is that the shorts are all four-digit numbers followed by one or more letters. So ...

1. Is that "four numbers followed by at least one letter" pattern consistent for ALL your time entries?

OR ...

2. Is that the ONLY type of content in this TIME glossary are entries that look like your samples and relate to time?

3. Assuming the answer to #2 is yes, how many entries are we talking about?

4. How do you want the display to look? Here are some options, or make up one of your own:

10-12 hours
10-12 hours (Ctrl- hotkey)
10-12 hours (Ctrl-)
10-12 hours (en dash)