Non-Breaking Space
A space that keeps a quotation mark or a word from being separated from its neighbour by a line break.
A non-breaking space is a special whitespace character that prevents the word before it and the word after it from being split across two lines. In typography it is used to keep small words with their neighbours ('New York,' 'p. 45') and to keep a closing quotation mark from dangling alone at the start of a line.
In quotation work, non-breaking spaces matter after an opening quotation mark and before a closing one. Without them, a quotation mark can be stranded at the end of a line while the quoted word begins the next, or vice versa.
Most word processors and typesetting systems allow non-breaking spaces to be inserted with a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows, Option+Space on a Mac, or the Unicode character U+00A0). HTML uses .
Common mistake: inserting a non-breaking space between every short word. The goal is to prevent awkward breaks, not to glue the whole sentence together.
“We must learn to live together — or perish.”
Keep reading the glossary
The curled apostrophe (’) used in typeset text, as opposed to the straight foot-mark (').
Curly typographic quote marks ('smart') versus the vertical marks of typewriters and code ('straight').
The punctuation that signals direct speech or a quoted phrase — single or double, depending on locale.
The use of an em dash to introduce or attribute a quotation.