Spacja

Spacja is the Polish term for the space character, the whitespace symbol used to separate words and other elements in text. In typography and computing, the most common space is the ASCII space, designated as U+0020, and produced by pressing the space bar on a keyboard.

There are several kinds of spaces used in digital text and typography. The regular space is the default separator between words. A non-breaking space (U+00A0) prevents a line break between the tied elements, useful in numbers with units or before certain punctuation. Other types include en space (U+2002) and em space (U+2003) for typographic alignment, as well as thinner spaces such as thin space (U+2009) and hair space (U+200A). Some spaces have special purposes, such as the figure space (U+2007) for aligning numerals or the zero-width space (U+200B), which affects line breaks without adding visible width.

Historically, the use of spaces to separate words emerged in late antiquity and became widespread in medieval manuscripts, significantly improving readability. Today, spaces are a fundamental aspect of written language in both natural language processing and everyday typing.

In modern usage, spaces play a role in programming and data processing, where they often separate tokens and can be meaningful in certain languages. In typography and typesetting, spaces influence line breaks, justification, and visual rhythm. While the regular space is the most common, different contexts may require non-breaking or specialized spaces to preserve formatting and readability.