Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 16, 2025)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
The hyphenation tool provided with Word can be very handy when creating a document. There may be some paragraphs, however, in which you don't want Word to hyphenate words. You can turn off hyphenation for selected paragraphs by following these steps:
Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.
Now when you choose to do an automatic hyphenation, all the paragraphs formatted for no hyphenation are skipped, and only those paragraphs that are not formatted that way are hyphenated. If you use styles, of course you can make this even easier by creating a paragraph style that has the hyphenation setting turned on or off according to your needs. Then, any paragraph to which you apply the style will remain unhyphenated.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11364) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Turning Off Paragraph Hyphenation.
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