U+00AD · Latin-1 Supplement

Soft Hyphen

The soft hyphen is an invisible marker that tells software where a word may be broken if it falls at the end of a line. When the break is needed, a hyphen appears; otherwise nothing is shown. It is useful for long words in narrow columns, particularly compound words in German, Dutch, and Finnish and long technical terms in English.

WindowsAlt 0173

UnicodeU+00AD

HTML

U+00AD

Character codes

Unicode code point	`U+00AD`
Decimal	`173`
HTML named entity
HTML (hex)
HTML (decimal)
CSS	`\00AD`
JavaScript	`\u00AD`
Python	`\u00AD`
UTF-8 bytes	`C2 AD`
UTF-16	`00AD`
URL-encoded	`%C2%AD`

Character details

Official name	SOFT HYPHEN
Unicode block	Latin-1 Supplement
General category	Format Character (Cf)
SymbolHero category	Spaces & Invisible Characters
Emoji	No

How to type the Soft Hyphen

Windows

Hold Alt and type 0173 on the numeric keypad (Num Lock on), then release Alt. Alt 0173 uses the Windows-1252 code page.
In Microsoft Word or Outlook: type 00AD then press Alt + X.
Open Character Map (search “Character Map” in Start), tick “Advanced view”, search for “soft hyphen”, then Select and Copy.

Mac

Press Control + Command + Space to open the Character Viewer, search “soft hyphen”, and double-click the result.
With the Unicode Hex Input keyboard enabled (System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources), hold Option and type 00AD.

iPhone & Android

Tap Copy at the top of this page, then long-press where you want it and choose Paste.

Docs & web

Google Docs: Insert → Special characters, then search “soft hyphen” or enter U+00AD.
HTML: or
Excel / Google Sheets: =UNICHAR(173)

Examples

Placed inside a long word such as 'internationalization' so it can hyphenate in a narrow mobile column
Written as in HTML headings to control where long product names break
Used in German compounds so browsers break them at sensible points

Good to know

Don’t mix it up: Often confused with the ordinary hyphen-minus - (U+002D), which is always visible and never disappears.

Tip: Because it is invisible, a stray soft hyphen can break text searches and copy-paste matches; inspect suspicious text with a code-point viewer.

Display: the character itself is always the same code point, but its shape comes from the font on the device showing it. If you see an empty box, the font lacks this glyph—the text is still correct.