The Broken Syllables
When you are formatting a document in Google Docs, especially when using “Justified” text alignment (where text stretches to touch both the left and right margins), the software has to make decisions about how to handle long words at the end of a line. In some configurations, or when pasting text from advanced layout programs like Adobe InDesign, Google Docs may attempt to automatically split long words across two lines, inserting a hyphen (e.g., “infor-mation”). While this creates a mathematically cleaner right edge, automatic hyphenation can make documents harder to read and often breaks words at incorrect syllables, looking unprofessional.
Disabling Automatic Hyphenation
To ensure your words remain whole and stop Google Docs from automatically splitting words across lines with hyphens, you need to ensure the document’s formatting rules strictly forbid it.
Unlike Microsoft Word, Google Docs does not have a global “Hyphenation” toggle in the main settings menu. Its hyphenation behavior is entirely dictated by the text alignment and paragraph settings. If you are seeing automatic word splitting, highlight the affected text. First, go to the top toolbar and ensure your text alignment is set to Left align (the icon with uneven right lines), not Justify. Justified text is the primary cause of forced hyphenation in Docs. If the problem persists, it may be inherited from the “Normal Text” style. Click Format > Clear formatting to strip away any hidden rules imported from pasted text. Finally, manually review the text; if a hyphen was physically pasted into the document from another source, Google Docs treats it as a hard character, and you must manually delete the hyphen and the space to rejoin the word.