Soft hyphen
UNICODE CHARACTER
; Soft HYphen; Soft Hyphen; Soft-hyphen; Soft hyphens; Discretionary hyphen; Optional hyphen; Syllable hyphen; SHY (code point); SHY (character); Shy (code point); Shy (character); Hyphenation hint; Breaking hyphen; U+00AD
In computing and typesetting, a soft hyphen (ISO 8859: 0xAD, Unicode , HTML: or or ) or syllable hyphen (EBCDIC: 0xCA), abbreviated SHY, is a code point reserved in some coded character sets for the purpose of breaking words across lines by inserting visible hyphens. Two alternative ways of using the soft hyphen character for this purpose have emerged, depending on whether the encoded text will be broken into lines by its recipient, or has already been preformatted by its originator.