Soft hyphen

In computing and typesetting, a soft hyphen (ISO 8859: 0xAD, Unicode U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN, 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 if they fall on the line end but remain invisible within the line.

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.