Formatting a list with varying (negative) first line indents

Hello. I'm working on a school textbook that has a vocabulary section in each lesson. I'd like to format each item on the list to have the definitions be separated with a hyphen but with the rest of the lines of the body text aligned separately from the vocabulary term. To do this, my initial plan is to set the first line indent to a negative value up until the hyphen character. However, since the terms have varying lengths, it would be impossible to define one style for it, unless I ignore that and just do everything manually. Unless, there is a possible way to do it? If so, may I please ask how it is done?