U00AD

U+00AD, commonly called the soft hyphen, is a Unicode character used to indicate a preferred point where a word may be broken at a line wrap. It is not usually visible as a glyph; instead, it marks a potential hyphenation point that may appear only when a line break occurs at that position.

In encoding terms, U+00AD resides in the Latin-1 Supplement block and is assigned the Unicode name SOFT HYPHEN. Its general category is Cf (format), meaning it is a formatting control character rather than a printable symbol.

Usage and behavior can vary by platform and rendering engine. When text is laid out, the soft hyphen signals where a word may be hyphenated if a break is needed; if no break occurs at that point, the character typically remains invisible. If a line break does occur at the marked point, a hyphen may be displayed. In practice, browsers and word processors handle soft hyphens differently, especially in the presence of different hyphenation settings or CSS rules.

In web contexts, the soft hyphen can be inserted as the HTML entity ­ (or via numeric references such as ­). It is one of several mechanisms for controlling line breaking without forcing an actual hyphen to appear.

Notes of caution include potential inconsistencies across applications and potential issues with text processing, search indexing, or file round-tripping if the character is not preserved. It should not be mistaken for a visible hyphen like U+002D (hyphen-minus).