| Character | |
| Name | Soft Hyphen |
| Unicode Code Point | U+00AD |
| Decimal Value | 173 |
| Hex Value | 0x00AD |
| Category | Latin-1 Supplement |
| Windows Alt Code | Alt+0173 |
| Word Alt+X Code | 00AD + Alt+X |
| Mac Shortcut | Not available — use copy/paste |
| HTML Entity | ­ |
| HTML Code (Dec / Hex) | ­ / ­ |
| CSS Content Code | content: "\00AD"; |
| JavaScript Unicode Escape | "\u{00AD}" |
Soft Hyphen is part of the Latin-1 Supplement block, primarily used for Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and others) that need accented letters or region-specific punctuation beyond plain ASCII.
Unicode block: Latin-1 Supplement (U+0080–U+00FF). This block extends ASCII with accented Latin letters, currency signs, and legal symbols. It maps directly onto ISO 8859-1 ("Latin-1"), the dominant Western-European text encoding of the 1990s, which is why Windows Alt codes for this range still work today.
At Unicode code point U+00AD (decimal 173), Soft Hyphen is the 13th of 95 characters cataloged in this category on How To Type Any Symbol. In terms of typing methods, it has a documented Windows Alt code, though no dedicated single-key Mac shortcut — Mac users generally rely on copy-paste for it. Regardless of platform, clicking the copy button above places the exact character on your clipboard, ready to paste into any application that accepts Unicode text.
💡 Good to know: Some fonts render Latin-1 Supplement characters with a different weight or spacing than base Latin letters — worth checking in headlines or logos.
Hold Alt and type 0173 on the numeric keypad.
No dedicated shortcut — click the copy button above and paste with Cmd+V.
Click the symbol above to copy it, then paste anywhere — works on every device and OS.
Use the entity ­ in your HTML.