My text is fully justified with auto hyphenation turned on. However, the auto hyphenation is showing a number of plural words as being hyphenated with "es" on the next line. For example, "faces" hyphenates as "fac-es" and "circumstances" hyphenates as "circumstanc-es." Is this correct? It seems to be that basic hyphenation rules should be applied (e.g., "fa-ces" and "circumstan-ces") and I've checked several dictionaries & multiple online sources, but can find no answer to how to properly hyphenate plural words. Btw, this is American English I'm using. Thanks for any guidance!
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Welcome to Stack Exchange ELU. As a new user you should do us the courtesy of finishing reading the [Tour] — that way we’ll know you have read how this site works (we’ll see you have the badge). I’d be interested to try to answer your question, although as typography it may be judged “off-topic”, but you need to realize you are dealing with a software solution to a complex problem..To give you any advice we’d need to know what software you are using that has “auto-hyphenation turned on”. – David Jan 23 '24 at 17:55
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2I think your formatting tool is poor for breaking words at that place. An answer to an SE Writing question shows a particularly bad word processor at work, hyphenating so-me. Good hyphenation should cue the brain as to how the word might continue, not break the flow. So in that example pro-fessor would be better as prof-essor. – Weather Vane Jan 23 '24 at 18:32
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@WeatherVane Good analysis. – Yosef Baskin Jan 23 '24 at 18:40
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1For hyphenating plural words, there is a hypheantion rule that says "hyphenate words at morpheme boundaries". This is why the hyphenations are not fa-ces and circumstan-ces, which would be the hyphenations if there wasn't a morpheme boundary in these words. See this answer. – Peter Shor Jan 23 '24 at 19:01
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2I'd say the correct way to hyphenate shorter words like axes, goes (as in 'it's your go'), dons, mates, faces, docks ... doesn't exist. Justification is by far the better better option. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 23 '24 at 19:01
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Optional hyphenation of the type described relates exclusively to typography —the printed form of the language. The primary consideration is visual psychology: the reader should not be hindered in reading the text, and this is the reason for hyphenation of justified text in the first place — that spacing between words should be comfortable to read and consistent from line to line. (Aesthetics is also involved.) Solving one problem by hyphenation introduces another problem in that one reads part of a word on one line, and the rest on another line; so typesetters in the pre-electronic era aimed to divide words in a way that one might speak the syllables and where one was not misled by the fragment on the first line. They did this manually, using their training (or house style), experience, and knowledge of the spoken language — something that is hard to reproduce in software.
The original poster of this question has noticed examples of poor hyphenation — ‘es’ is not a pronounced syllable — but has asked the wrong question in assuming that the problem is that they both involve plurals. He also makes the mistake of assuming there is some ‘standard’, when what is important is the principle involved.
Professional page-layout software (InDesign, QuarkXPress etc.) does give one control over hyphenation. The default hyphenation settings for In-Design allow paragraph hyphenation resulting in 2-letter fragments, and the problem in this case could be eliminated by changing the settings as suggested below (from https://www.creativelive.com/blog/hyphenation-dos-and-donts/).
However hyphenation choices are not absolute, but depend on other aspects of the type such as the width of columns. One should check the type oneself and make any manual changes by over-riding the default settings, as is possible with professional software.
David
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