it from any regular hyphen that might have been part of the original spelling of the word. This distinction helps re-use of already formatted text, when line breaks and soft hyphens inserted during word wrapping have to be removed to convert the text back into its unformatted form. For example, the copy or paste function of a terminal emulator can offer to replace line breaks with a space character, and remove any soft hyphens including any immediately following whitespace characters. An example application that outputs soft hyphens for this reason is the groff text formatter as used on many Unix/Linux systems to display man pages. Encodings and definitions SHY characters in coded characters sets, roughly in chronological order: EBCDIC placed a SHY character (known there as a "syllable hyphen") at position 202 (0xCA hexadecimal). IBM defined its purpose as a "hyphen used to divide a word at the end of a line [that] may be removed when a program adjusts lines." German standard DIN 31626 defined a C1 control code set defining 0x8D as an "Optional Syllabification Control (OSC)", a "print control character" for use marking syllable boundaries in long words. This C1 control set was registered in 1979. (Note: this is not the same as the ISO/IEC 6429 C1 control code .) ISO 8859-1:1986 (Latin 1) inherited SHY from EBCDIC, but called it "soft hyphen", placed it at position 0xAD (hexadecimal), and stated its purpose as "for use when a line break has been established within a word". Other ISO 8859 parts placed it at the same position, with the exception of ISO 8859-11 (Latin/Thai), which lacks it. IBM code page 850 (an MS-DOS character set covering all ISO 8859-1 characters) placed it at position 240 = 0xF0. SGML's "Numeric and Special Graphic" (isonum) character entity set (ISO 8879:1986) includes &shy; for the ISO 8859-1 soft hyphen. Unicode 1.0 (1991) and ISO 10646 (1993) took the first 256 code positions from ISO 8859-1, resulting in SHY at Unicode code point of U+00AD. HTML 2 (1995) incorporated the "&shy;" character entity from SGML, but explicitly discouraged its use. HTML 4 (1999) redefined the purpose of the character as marking a hyphenation opportunity, which only becomes visible as a hyphen at the end of a line after formatting. Unicode 4.0 (2002) changed the category of its SHY character from previously "Pd" (punctuation, dash) to "Cf" (other, format), thereby aligning its interpretation