Facts about the Hyphen
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Soft hyphens, inserted in HTML with the entity , allow browsers to break long words at optimal points without displaying a visible hyphen unless the text actually wraps to the next line.
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During legal proceedings, the hyphen carries binding significance in contracts and legislation, where courts have ruled that hyphenated compound words in statutes carry different legal meanings than their unhyphenated counterparts, as established in multiple U.S. Supreme Court decisions between 1980 and 2015.
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American English style guides including the Chicago Manual of Style designate the hyphen as a 0.2-em space character, making it slightly shorter than the 0.3-em en-dash used in 2024 digital publishing standards.
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Hyphens reduce readability by approximately 10-15 percent when appearing more than twice per line, according to studies by typographic researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.
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Most modern word processors automatically replace a typed hyphen with an en-dash when flanked by spaces, a feature introduced in Microsoft Word 97 during 1996.
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Typographers call the hyphen a diacritic when used in German, where it separates syllables across line breaks with a length of roughly 0.2 inches in 12-point fonts.
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Compound words connected by hyphens in English average 2-3 morphemes, with over 10,000 hyphenated terms documented in the Oxford English Dictionary.
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In 1754, the hyphen first appeared as a distinct typographic character in Benjamin Franklin's printing standards for American colonial publications.