Word spacing
20 comments
·December 5, 2025pinkmuffinere
This is fascinating! At the same time, this wikipedia article is of surprisingly low quality, with sentences like
> It is hard to determine how much spacing should be put in between words, but a good typographer is able to determine proper spacing.[3]
> Since the fifteenth century, the best work shows that text is to be read smoothly and efficiently.[4]
> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
contingencies
Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.
kccqzy
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
piskov
Why would you use visible noise for something that should be void
dhosek
This is still the standard in setting Ethiopic text
mrsvanwinkle
I love that better! I was also just in Italy recently and you made me double take this tablet hanging on a canopy in one of the peregrination churches and they ARE interpuncts but for names only
Terr_
Nowadays I only see/use the middle dot to cla⸱ri⸱fy syl⸱la⸱bles in lyr⸱ics.
sempron64
This is for Latin. The Dead Sea Scrolls have clear spacing between the words. https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls
The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html
wanderingstan
Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters”
Terr_
Since we're already being picky about languages, that's not a factoid: Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't actually facts.
The whole -oid suffix, really. Asteroids aren't really stars, meteoroids aren't really meteors, androids aren't really men, spheroids aren't really spheres, factoids aren't really facts, etc.
abdullahkhalids
OT: Urdu, like Arabic/Persian, is written with an alphabet where letters can change shape based on whether they are at the start, middle or end of a "word" [1]. I say "word" because some letters don't have a middle form, so each actual word is broken into a sequence of composite-letter-shapes, where each composite shape start with such a no-middle-form letter.
A problem arises when one wants to write a compound word, which the last letter for the first word and the first letter of the second word must not be joined. To achieve this, the unicode standard has U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character, which should be used in such compound words [2]. The standard SPACE character should not be used because it will create a physical space, while U+200C will create a break with no space.
However, typically Urdu keyboards don't have this character in them, so everyone ends up either using SPACE or just joining the words.
delichon
> Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sänger, in his book The Spaces between the Words, refers to as aerated text.
I like that term. I particularly enjoy a large amount of ventilation of code, with plenty of breezy white spaces after purposely short lines and between brief declarations.
msuniverse2026
Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the article.
eesmith
Also English. ("In English, the ability to ...")
retentionissue
And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how terrible things turned out.............
SideburnsOfDoom
I'm told that things took a turn for the worse in 1649.
doener
m4rtink
Japanese does not have spaces between words and it works just fine. ^_^
dhosek
Ditto with Thai, Chinese, Lao, etc. I think Korean is the only east-asian script which uses word spacing. Given the late introduction of word spacing into writing, it’s almost more a surprise that scripts have it than don’t.
Instead of that sorry excuse of an article, here is the proper long-read about spaces.
Albeit in Russian, all modern browsers support live translation — should be fine.
https://type.today/ru/journal/spaces
—
BTW typography is very important to Russian designers and developers.
Most install special typography layout (with right alt layer for the symbols) to always enter correct m-dashes, quotes, and what have you.
https://ilyabirman.ru/typography-layout/
There is even an ongoing meme with a woman crying “I don’t deserve such treatment, that’s how I’ve always written” when her flawless typography was considered ChatGPT in the making.