Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Turning Off Paragraph Hyphenation.

Turning Off Paragraph Hyphenation

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated February 22, 2020)
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:

Make sure the insertion point is located in the paragraph you don't want to hyphenate. (If you want to turn off hyphenation for several paragraphs, simply select all those paragraphs.)
Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group. Word displays the Paragraph dialog box.
Make sure the Line and Page Breaks tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.

Ensure the Don't Hyphenate check box is selected.
Click on OK.

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.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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