Word Spacing
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The debate around word spacing has sparked a lively discussion, with some commenters pointing out that many languages, such as Japanese, Thai, and Chinese, don't use spaces between words and still manage to function just fine. Others have chimed in with alternative methods, like the interpunct, a small dot used to separate words, which some find more aesthetically pleasing. While one commenter argued that word spacing is "visible noise" that should be avoided, others countered that it's a necessary element of written language, sparking a fascinating discussion about the role of negative space in communication. As commenters dug deeper, they uncovered interesting historical and cultural examples, such as the use of interpuncts in ancient Italian carvings and Ethiopic text.
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Dec 5, 2025 at 3:08 AM EST
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E.g. さっきまでは、心ぼそくてなきだしそうなのを、ひっしにこらえていたリナだったが、いまはまいごにまちがえられたことに、はらをたてていた。
With e.g. まちがえられた you could parse it as 間違えられた or 町が得られた and you can only tell the difference through context and intuition, which a learner of the language might lack. Even being able to recognize は and に as particles, rather than parts of the nearby words, requires context and/or guessing.
Kanji makes it a lot easier to figure out where words begin and end. Nouns are often written entirely in kanji, while adjectives and verbs are usually written with kanji at the beginning and hiragana for the parts that are conjugated (the ends, in both cases). A switch from hiragana to kanji usually means a word boundary, while kanji to hiragana can go either way.
I’m not sure at what target age kids’ books stop using word spacing, but books for younger children generally use it. Nevertheless, if you are used to seeing words written in kanji, even with word spacing an all-hiragana text can still trip you up, for the reasons you noted.
Side comment: Something I haven’t seen remarked on much is how Japanese can be easier for small children to start reading than English is because of the nearly one-to-one correspondence between character and sound for kana. My two daughters and now my six-year-old grandson have all grown up with Japanese as their first language, and they all started reading hiragana-only children’s books earlier and more easily than I, at least, learned to read English when I was a child. My grandson has also picked up katakana on his own; he is into dinosaurs and his picture books give the names of dinosaurs in katakana.
It has nothing to do with text legibility.
> 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.
Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu
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.
I think you might be right but not definitively so: the Oxford dictionary has your definition, as does the New Oxford American dictionary which also lists the following as North American usage:
> a brief or trivial item of news or information
Imagine that approach to biology: "All our DNA is ultimately a bunch of errors accumulated over time, so that F508del is actually normal in the grand scheme of things."
> Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural?
That’s entirely unrelated and uncontroversial; one is the plural of a “people,” a distinct group of folks with shared culture, nationality, or other traits, whereas the other is the possessive form of a word that is already plural, so I’m not sure if that’s a red herring or if you’ve actually seen such incorrect usage being advocated for.
I'll add "factoid."
For some of the samples on that site, it'd question whether they even have majority support as "correct", as opposed to simply being a popular mistake. Do any polls exist?
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.
Many 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.
If someone wanted to write an excellent survey about word spacing, Wikipedia would be a fine venue for it. And I hold out hope that will eventually happen for this and many other topics. But in the mean time, what's there now is certainly better than nothing. It at least gives readers a place to start.
As for encyclopedia articles more generally: some encyclopedia-like reference works have outstanding articles. For example, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography is one of the best sources anywhere to learn about the history of science, one scholar at a time. But some encyclopedias are full of lazy slop.
Dashes article is ok though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
Also, liked the article!
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.
Manual: Spaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199530
"Word spacing is crucial for the written form because it illustrates the sound of speech where audible gaps or pauses take place."
If I were reading it aloud, even for a presentation, the spaces between morphemes would be more like this:
"Wordspacing iscru'cial forthewri'ttenform be'cause itill'ustrates thesoun'dofspeech where audiblegaps or pauses takeplace."
where a ' is a shorted pause than a space. The length of the ' isn't really long enough to be called out as a pause, but it's definitely longer than between words which frequently run directly into the next.
Spacing is important, but it's as an aid to parsing a written sentence at speed, and almost nothing to do with showing the pauses between morphemes.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner
The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html