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Hyphenation and dyslexia: should you turn it off?
Hyphenation is the small typographic habit of breaking a word at the end of a line and continuing it on the next, joined by a hyphen: dys- on one line, lexia on the next. On a printed novel it is almost invisible. For a dyslexic reader it is the opposite of invisible, because the one thing that makes reading easier is keeping whole words intact, and hyphenation does the exact opposite. This piece explains why, when it matters, and how to switch it off everywhere you read.
The short answer
For dyslexic reading, turn hyphenation off. A word split across two lines forces you to hold the first fragment in memory, jump to the next line, and reassemble the word before you can recognise it. That is exactly the kind of effort dyslexic readers are already short on. Left-aligned text with no hyphenation gives you a ragged right edge but whole, recognisable words, and the words matter far more than the tidy edge.
What hyphenation actually does to a word
Fluent reading does not happen letter by letter. The eye lands on a word, recognises its overall shape and a few anchor letters, and moves on. Researchers call that shape recognition, and it is one of the things that lets a confident reader move quickly. A split word breaks the shape in half. Instead of seeing information as one familiar block, you see infor- at the end of one line, then have to track down to the start of the next line, find mation, and stitch the two halves back together.
For a reader without dyslexia, that reassembly is automatic and almost free. For a dyslexic reader it is not free at all. Two of the difficulties most often reported in dyslexia are working memory load and losing your place on the line. Hyphenation taxes both at once. You have to keep the first fragment in working memory while your eye makes the riskiest move in reading, the return sweep to the next line, which is also where readers most often lose their place. A hyphenated word puts a memory task and a tracking task back to back, at the worst possible moment.
The two blocks above contain the same words in the same narrow column. The first keeps a clean right edge by hyphenating; the second keeps every word whole and lets the right edge fall where it falls. For most dyslexic readers the second is markedly easier, even though it looks less polished.
Why hyphenation and justified text travel together
You rarely meet hyphenation on its own. It almost always rides along with justified text, the setting that stretches each line to reach both margins. Justification needs somewhere to put the slack, and it has two options: stretch the spaces between words, or break a long word with a hyphen to fill the line more evenly. Turn justification on and you usually get hyphenation as a side effect; the two problems arrive as a pair.
That pairing matters because justified text causes its own trouble for dyslexic readers. The uneven word spacing creates "rivers" of white space that drag the eye vertically down the page instead of along the line. We covered that in detail in justified versus left-aligned text for dyslexia, and the conclusion there applies here too: left alignment with a ragged right edge is the more readable default. Switching to left alignment also quietly removes most hyphenation, because once the line no longer has to reach the right margin, the browser has far less reason to break a word.
When hyphenation is hardest to avoid
Hyphenation gets worse as columns get narrower, because a narrow column has fewer places to break a line cleanly, so the layout reaches for the hyphen more often. That makes a few situations especially prone to it:
Reading on a phone is the obvious one. A narrow phone screen with justified text hyphenates aggressively, sometimes breaking a word every second or third line. If you read a lot on mobile, this is worth fixing first; our guide to reading on mobile with dyslexia covers the wider set of phone tweaks. Multi-column layouts are the other common culprit. Newspaper-style sites, some PDFs, and academic two-column papers pack text into thin columns that hyphenate constantly, which is one reason reading research papers with dyslexia feels so much harder than reading a normal web article.
How to turn hyphenation off
The good news is that hyphenation is almost always a setting, not something baked into the text. Here is how to switch it off in the places it shows up most.
In Microsoft Word
Word does not hyphenate by default, but documents shared with you may have it switched on. Go to the Layout tab, open Hyphenation, and set it to None. While you are there, set alignment to left rather than justified; the two settings together give you whole words and even spacing.
In Google Docs
Google Docs does not hyphenate automatically, so there is usually nothing to switch off. If a document looks justified with awkward gaps, select the text and choose left alignment. Our full walkthrough of a dyslexia-friendly Google Docs setup covers the spacing and font changes that go alongside this.
On the web, in Chrome
Most websites do not hyphenate, but some do, and you cannot edit their stylesheet. The cleaner fix is to stop reading the page on the site's terms at all. Reader mode strips the page back to plain left-aligned text with no justification and no hyphenation, which removes the problem in one step. We compared the options in reader mode versus reading extensions; for a quick fix, reader mode is the fastest route.
If you build web pages
If you are the one writing the CSS, the relevant property is hyphens. Setting hyphens: none on body text switches automatic hyphenation off, and avoiding text-align: justify keeps spacing even. Both belong on any dyslexia-friendly web design checklist, alongside generous line spacing and a readable font.
What about real hyphens inside words?
It is worth drawing a line between two different things that both use a hyphen. Automatic, line-end hyphenation is the one to switch off: it splits a word only because the line ran out of room, and the break point is arbitrary. A real hyphen inside a compound word, such as well-being, self-esteem or dyslexia-friendly, is part of the word's actual spelling and carries meaning. You do not want to remove those, and switching off automatic hyphenation does not touch them. The settings described above only stop the layout from inventing new breaks; they leave the spelling of compound words exactly as written.
There is also a halfway case worth knowing about. Some readers find that very long compound or technical words are easier when the real hyphen gives the eye a natural resting point, breaking dyslexia-friendly into two manageable chunks rather than one long blur. That is fine, because the break sits at a meaningful boundary and stays in the same place every time. The problem with automatic hyphenation is precisely that its breaks are not meaningful and move around as the column reflows, so the eye can never learn to expect them.
The honest trade-off
Hyphenation is not malicious. It exists for a real reason: on narrow justified columns, breaking the occasional word produces more even spacing than stretching the gaps would, and in print, where left alignment can look untidy, that even texture is genuinely nicer to look at. Typographers reach for it because it makes a page look calm and professional.
But "looks calm" and "is easy to read" are not the same thing, and for dyslexic readers they often pull in opposite directions. The visual neatness of a straight right edge is bought with split words, and split words cost reading effort. When the goal is to read with less fatigue rather than to win a design award, the trade is clearly worth making: accept the ragged edge, keep the whole words.
The quick test: open something you find tiring to read and look at the right-hand edge. If it is perfectly straight, the text is justified and probably hyphenating. Switch to left alignment or reader mode and read the same passage again. Most dyslexic readers feel the difference within a paragraph.
Where LexiFont fits
Turning off hyphenation removes one specific obstacle, but it is only one part of comfortable reading. The bigger levers are the font itself, the size, the spacing, and the background. LexiFont is a Chrome extension that applies a dyslexia-friendly font to every website you visit, so you are reading in OpenDyslexic or another clear typeface instead of whatever the site chose. Combined with reader mode to flatten justified, hyphenated layouts, and with the line and letter spacing tweaks that give each word room to breathe, it turns a hostile page into a readable one.
If you want the wider font choice, the LexiFont Pro tier adds Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue as a one-time purchase, so you can find the typeface that suits your eyes rather than settling for the one default.
Get LexiFont Pro — OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue for $14.99 one-time