# What does a soft hyphen do?

A discretionary hyphenation control that can become visible at a line break. Code points: U+00AD. Its rendered appearance depends on line wrapping and rendering context. A non-equivalent fallback is "-" (Visible hyphen). Always visible; changes spelling or typography. Font coverage, shaping, and application acceptance were not tested, so those results are unknown.

## Code points

- U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN

## What was checked

### Soft hyphen

A discretionary hyphenation control that can become visible at a line break.

Its rendered appearance depends on line wrapping and rendering context.

Use an ordinary visible hyphen only when it is part of the actual text.

## What this does not prove

No OS, font, browser, application, field policy or rendering engine was tested. Unicode validity and segmentation do not establish actual display or acceptance.

Unicode release recorded with this answer: 18.0.0.
Machine-readable JSON: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/answers/what-a-soft-hyphen-does.json
Exact lookup: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/exact/00AD.json
HTML: https://copypastecharacters.com/answers/what-a-soft-hyphen-does/

Do not invent a platform-support claim from this data.