Preventing hyphenation of a particular word#

It’s quite possible for (any) hyphenation of a particular word to seem « completely wrong », so that you want to prevent it being hyphenated.

If the word occurs in just one place, put it in a box :

\mbox{oddword}

(Plain users should use \hbox, and take care at the start of paragraphs.) However, boxing the word is not really advisable unless you are sure it only occurs once.

If the word occurs commonly, the best choice is to assert an hyphenation exception for it :

\hyphenation{oddword}

This hyphenation exception (with no break points) will be used in preference to what hyphenation algorithm may come up with.

In a multilingual document, repeat the exception specification for each language the word may appear in. So :

\usepackage[french,english]{babel}
\selectlanguage{english}
\hyphenation{oddword}
\selectlanguage{french}
\hyphenation{oddword}

(note that babel will select the default language for the document — English, in this case — at \begin{document}.)

A particular instance of this requirement is avoiding the hyphenation of acronyms; a general rule for those that concoct acronyms seems to be to make the capital-letter sequence read as near as is possible like a « real word, but hyphenating an acronym often looks silly. The control \uchyph is designed for suppressing such behaviour :

\uchyph=0

will stop hyphenation of upper-case words. (Note that Plain syntax is needed here : there’s no alternative for setting this value.)