Hyphens Missing from Hyphenated Words in Word for the web

Last Updated: April 8, 2026

ISSUE

Large language models (LLMs) generate text with some specialized hyphens that aren’t encountered often in day-to-day use.

The Word team has identified an issue where the characters NON-BREAKING HYPHEN (U+2011) and SOFT HYPHEN (U+00AD) are omitted when opening a docx file that contains them in Word for the web.

For example, text like this:

state-of-the-art

Will be shown like this:

stateoftheart

STATUS: FIXED

The issue is now fixed through a service change and is in the process of rolling out.

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Fixes or workarounds for recent issues in Word for Windows