unspaced

Unspaced is an adjective used to describe text, writing systems, or data that contain no spaces between words, tokens, or elements. The term is most commonly applied in two domains: typography and linguistics, and data processing.

In linguistics and typography, unspaced writing describes scripts or styles where explicit word boundaries are not routinely shown. Some logographic or syllabic scripts, such as Chinese and Japanese, historically write without spaces between words. Thai and other scripts sometimes present spaces inconsistently, leading to readability challenges. In modern practice, publishers and digital platforms may insert punctuation or light spacing to aid readability, but the underlying writing system remains effectively unspaced. Unspaced text can complicate word segmentation and natural language processing, requiring algorithms to infer word boundaries.

In branding and design, the term may describe logotypes or headlines that intentionally omit spaces for aesthetic or compactness. Such usage can affect legibility and searchability.

In data processing, unspaced data refers to strings that contain no whitespace, such as identifiers, codes, or compact timestamps. Cleaning and normalization often involve removing, replacing, or standardizing whitespace, depending on the intended format.

Variations include hyphenated or concatenated forms where spaces are replaced by other separators. The study of unspaced text interacts with OCR, NLP, and typesetting, highlighting the relationship between script, typography, and machine interpretation.