x00AD

x00AD, commonly written as U+00AD, is the soft hyphen, a Unicode formatting character. It occupies code point 00AD in the Latin-1 Supplement block. Its formal name is SOFT HYPHEN.

Its purpose is to mark a possible hyphenation point within a word. In normal text it is invisible and does not print a visible symbol. If a line break occurs at the position of the soft hyphen, most software will insert a hyphen at the break; if no break occurs, the character remains hidden. It does not affect word boundaries for indexing or searching beyond enabling a potential break point when needed.

Encoding and usage: In HTML, the character can be encoded as ­ or as the named entity ­. In Unicode strings it is represented by the single code point U+00AD. Word processors, typesetting systems, and web browsers use soft hyphens to allow automatic hyphenation without committing to a visible hyphen ahead of time. Some systems may strip or ignore soft hyphens during normalization or when hyphenation is disabled; others will render a visible hyphen at a line break point if required.

Compatibility and limitations: Because soft hyphens are invisible by default, they can be lost in plain text transfers, copy-paste operations, or font rendering that does not support hyphenation. Behavior varies across platforms, fonts, and languages, making their presence sometimes unnoticed in plain text while enabling cleaner hyphenation in formatted contexts. See also: Soft hyphen, Hyphenation, Unicode control characters.