@typographica tweeted about the soft hyphen; and the HTML entity caught my attention “­” Here is a quick and dirty Code Pen of the ­ entity in action.

See the Pen Shy Guy — the soft hyphen by Chris Lowe (@alltimelowe) on CodePen.


I find it quite facinating actually that a character can appear and disappear only when needed. If you adjust the width of the paragraph in the above Pen you’ll see the soft hyphen in the words “softhyphen” and “collapse” goes away and doesn’t break the word. Neat.