The Broken Words
When justifying text or dealing with narrow columns, word processors often employ hyphenation—splitting a long word at the end of a line with a hyphen and continuing it on the next line to maintain a flush margin. However, Google Docs sometimes attempts to perform this automatically, especially if you are working with text imported from a different program or dealing with very tight margins. This automatic splitting can make documents significantly harder to read and ruins the clean aesthetic of professional reports or academic papers where strict, unbroken words are preferred.
Disabling Automatic Hyphenation
To keep your words whole and stop Google Docs from automatically splitting words across lines with hyphens, you must ensure the specific document setting is disabled.
Currently, Google Docs handles hyphenation somewhat dynamically based on formatting, but you can override it if you are seeing unwanted splits. Open your document. To ensure the fix applies to everything, press Ctrl+A (or Cmd+A on Mac) to highlight all the text. Look at the top menu bar and click on Format. Scroll down and hover over Text. Look for an option related to Hyphenation (if it is available in your specific enterprise or personal build). If it is not explicitly listed there, the issue is often tied to text justification. With all text highlighted, click the Align & indent icon on the toolbar and ensure you are using Left align (Ctrl+Shift+L) rather than “Justify” (Ctrl+Shift+J). Full justification forces Google Docs to stretch spacing and frequently induces automatic hyphenation to make the block fit. Forcing left alignment immediately stops the aggressive word splitting.