soft hyphen

English

Noun

soft hyphen (plural soft hyphens)

1. (computing, typography) A generally invisible text character marking a point where hyphenation can occur without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is later reflowed.

Usage notes

The interpretation of this character varies among standards and some text systems. Unicode defines it incompatibly with ISO 8859-1 which defines it as "[a] graphic character that is imaged by a graphic symbol identical with, or similar to, that representing hyphen, for use when a line break has been established within a word." [1]

Synonyms

• discretionary hyphen

Translations

a generally invisible text character marking a point where hyphenation can occur without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is later reflowed

• German: weiches Trennzeichen n, bedingter Trennstrich m, weicher Trennstrich m, bedingtes Trennzeichen n
• Hungarian: puha kötőjel, puha elválasztójel