Word spacing
by doener on 12/5/2025, 8:08:42 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_spacing
Comments
by: pinkmuffinere
This is fascinating! At the same time, this wikipedia article is of surprisingly low quality, with sentences like<p>> 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]<p>> Since the fifteenth century, the best work shows that text is to be read smoothly and efficiently.[4]<p>> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
12/8/2025, 8:38:22 PM
by: sempron64
This is for Latin. The Dead Sea Scrolls have clear spacing between the words. <a href="https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls" rel="nofollow">https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls</a><p>The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: <a href="https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html</a>
12/8/2025, 9:08:46 PM
by: kccqzy
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
12/8/2025, 8:37:23 PM
by: abdullahkhalids
OT: Urdu, like Arabic/Persian, is written with an alphabet where letters can change shape based on whether they are at the start, middle or end of a "word" [1]. I say "word" because some letters don't have a middle form, so each actual word is broken into a sequence of composite-letter-shapes, where each composite shape start with such a no-middle-form letter.<p>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.<p>However, typically Urdu keyboards don't have this character in them, so everyone ends up either using SPACE or just joining the words.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner</a>
12/8/2025, 9:08:47 PM
by: wanderingstan
Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters”<p><a href="https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu</a>
12/8/2025, 8:51:21 PM
by: delichon
> Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sänger, in his book The Spaces between the Words, refers to as aerated text.<p>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.
12/8/2025, 9:01:00 PM
by: msuniverse2026
Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the article.
12/8/2025, 8:41:15 PM
by: retentionissue
And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how terrible things turned out.............
12/8/2025, 8:58:59 PM
by: doener
Via <a href="https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115665925876659478" rel="nofollow">https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115665925876659478</a>
12/5/2025, 8:08:59 AM