Soft hyphen

In computing and typesetting, a soft hyphen (ISO 8859: 0xAD, Unicode U+00ADSOFT HYPHEN, HTML: ­ ­) 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.