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An invisible mark that says where a word may break.
Also known as: Discretionary hyphen, Invisible hyphen
A character you cannot see unless it is doing its job. It marks a permitted hyphenation point, appearing as a hyphen only when the line actually breaks there — and it is a notorious cause of search failures because it is present in the text and absent from the screen.
A character marking a point at which a word may be hyphenated if it falls at the end of a line, rendered as a hyphen there and as nothing anywhere else.
Invisible characters in copied text are a recurring source of failures that look inexplicable: a search for a word does not find it, two apparently identical strings do not compare equal, and nothing on screen shows why.
If a string will not match and looks right, suspect an invisible character.
Nothing at all in most positions; a short horizontal stroke at the end of a line where the word has been broken.