Soft Hyphenate

Adds soft hyphens to titles and content from a list of words you keep, so long names break cleanly where the browser won’t break them.

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WordPress 6.7 or later · PHP 7.4 or later · GPL v2 or later

What it does

Browsers hyphenate for themselves when a stylesheet asks with hyphens: auto, but Chrome and Firefox leave capitalized words alone. So a department’s name or a place name in a heading runs out of its column on a phone, where a plain word would have broken. Soft Hyphenate puts the break points in for the words you choose.

It adds a soft hyphen, the invisible one, to titles and content as they are shown. The word reads as itself until it has to break at the edge of its box; then the browser breaks it at the point you marked and shows a hyphen there. Nothing is written into the post.

How it works

Under Settings, Soft Hyphenate takes a list of words, one to a line, with a hyphen wherever the word may break:

Ac-cred-i-ta-tion
In-ter-dis-ci-pli-nary
Su-per-in-ten-dentCode language: plaintext (plaintext)

On the front end the plugin looks through each title and each post’s content for those words and puts a soft hyphen at every mark. In the page’s source the word carries them; on the screen it looks as it always did until a narrow column needs one.

That’s the whole plugin. There is no algorithm guessing at the rest of the dictionary, because the browser already does that part well.

Good for

Headings with long names in them. Departments, programs, places, and titles, which are capitalized and so left alone by the browser.
Narrow columns. Sidebars, cards, and phones, where one long word decides whether the layout holds.
A site that already uses the browser’s hyphenation and needs a few words it misses.

What to know

It is curated, not automatic. Only the words on the list are touched. For hyphenation of everything, a plugin like wp-Typography is the heavier tool.
It works with the browser’s own hyphenation, not instead of it. Keep hyphens: auto on and let the list cover what the browser won’t.
The stored post is unchanged. The hyphens go in as the page is shown, so editing and search see the plain word.
Soft hyphens travel with copied text. They stay invisible in most places, but a word pasted into a search box carries them.