Hyphenation for line breaks

Hyphens can be used in typesetting to divide words between the end of a line and the next line, to meet space or formatting constraints:

inter-
national

pre-
cede

sup-
port

Line-break hyphenation is often an automatic process done during the design stage. However, you may need to edit the automatic hyphens, or to manually add hyphens in undesigned content. Follow the following rules to add line-break hyphens.

Do’s for line-break hyphenation

Put the hyphen at the end of the line, not the beginning of the next line:

com-
pass
not
com
-pass

Make sure each component of the word has at least 3 letters (unless the hyphen occurs after a 2-letter prefix or in a compound word whose first part has only 2 letters – see below):

align-
ment
not
a-
lignment

You can divide the word:

  • between syllables

sport-
ing
not
sp-
orting

  • between prefixes and base words (see Prefixes for a list of common prefixes)

geo-
logical

ultra-
light

  • between the 2 halves of a compound word (see Compound words for more examples of such words)

tooth-
ache

up-
beat

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Don’ts for line-break hyphenation

Do not use a line-break hyphen in:

  • words with only 1 syllable

leave
not
le-
ave

  • words that are already hyphenated

accident-
prone
not
acc-
ident-prone

  • proper nouns

Sydney
not
Syd-
ney

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