The hyphens property controls whether words may be automatically broken and hyphenated at line breaks. It is a typographic control that influences how text wraps within a container: when automatic hyphenation is enabled, the rendering engine can insert hyphenation points inside words according to language-specific rules and dictionaries, reducing uneven line endings and improving justification. Because hyphenation relies on linguistic rules, its behavior is sensitive to the text language and to the presence of explicit soft-hyphen characters in the text; those manual hints interact with the automatic process to allow or forbid specific break opportunities.

Hyphenation affects not only visual appearance but also layout metrics. Introducing hyphens changes where lines break, which can alter the height of a block, the distribution of white space, and the number of lines used. For narrow columns or fully justified text, allowing hyphenation often produces more even word spacing and fewer overly stretched or compressed spaces. However, excessive or poorly chosen hyphenation can harm readability, so hyphenation is typically balanced against other line-breaking and wrapping behaviors and typographic practices.

This property must be considered alongside other text-wrapping and line-breaking controls. For example, overflow-wrap determines whether long words may be broken to avoid overflow, while word-break changes the rules for breaking words at line boundaries; these interact with hyphenation decisions and together determine where breaks are allowed. In contexts with East Asian text, line-break rules affect acceptable break positions and can change how hyphenation is applied or whether it is appropriate at all. When designing readable, stable layouts, consider the combined effect of these properties, the language of the content, and any manual hyphenation hints embedded in the text.