How to use the shy soft hyphen in HTML

The other day I created a cool example using the <wbr> HTML tag. And although its a very cool tag on its own, there might be a better solution:

We can use &shy. It is a soft hyphen in HTML.

It means it will add a - if the word is too long. Else it will just render the word as is.

I’ll be using my <wbr> demo to add the soft hyphen as an option.

How the ­ works permalink

You can place the ­ in a word or in places where you want it to enter a soft hyphen when the word is too long for its container:

super­long­word­that­needs­to­break­better

As you can see, the implementation is the same as we saw with <wbr>; however, this is not an HTML element but an entity.

Demo permalink

In the following Codepen, I demonstrate three methods:

• shy: using the ­ in the word
• wbr: using the <wbr> in the word
• css: using word-break in css.

See the Pen Using the shy soft hyphen by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

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