U+00AD "­" Soft Hyphen Unicode Character

U+00AD "­" Soft Hyphen is an invisible formatting character used in digital text to indicate a potential hyphenation point within a word where a line break may occur. When the text is displayed and the word falls near the end of a line, a soft hyphen instructs the rendering system to insert a visible hyphen and break the word at that specific point, but if the word fits entirely on the line, the soft hyphen remains invisible and has no effect. This character is particularly useful in justified or narrow-column layouts for preventing awkward gaps or overflow without permanently altering the original word. It must be supported by the software and font for proper behavior, as many applications may ignore it or display it as a visible glyph.