wordbreak

Wordbreak refers to the concept of where a line or a string can be divided into words, and how those divisions are determined in text processing, layout, and computation. The idea encompasses both how text is physically wrapped on a page or screen and how language processing systems segment text into meaningful units.

In typography and text layout, word breaking governs line breaks and hyphenation. Most languages that use spaces break lines between words, while East Asian languages often require rules to determine whether a break occurs between characters or within a word. Hyphenation and punctuation also influence where breaks can occur, and different typesetting systems apply language- and script-specific conventions to minimize awkward ragged edges and preserve readability.

In natural language processing, word segmentation or tokenization is a related challenge, especially for languages that do not use explicit word boundaries. For example, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai text often requires algorithms that combine dictionaries, statistical models, and contextual clues to determine correct word boundaries. Effective word breaking is foundational for tasks such as search indexing, machine translation, and information extraction.

In web design and computing, the CSS word-break property controls how lines may be broken within words. Values commonly used are normal, break-all, and keep-all, with behavior varying by language and browser. A related property, overflow-wrap (formerly word-wrap), can force breaking of long words or URLs to prevent overflow. Together, these tools influence responsive design and text accessibility.

In computer science, the Word Break problem asks whether a string can be segmented into a sequence of dictionary words. It is typically addressed with dynamic programming and has variants that require enumerating all valid segmentations.