A Program to Hyphenate English Words

Hyphenation programs used in computerized typesetting employ varied techniques-often in combination-to determine where to break the last word on a line. Usually, a dictionary lookup procedure is combined with a "logical hyphenation program" which bases its decisions on the recognition of certain characters, strings of characters, or patterns of vowels and consonants. The described program is such a logical routine. It is based on the word division rules of Webster's New International Dictionary and recognizes prefixes, suffixes, and other letter combinations which require special processing, including strings which are likely to belong to accented syllables. Otherwise, normal processing consists of finding the character pair corresponding to the greatest interruption of spoken sound, using a prestored table which contains a "break value" for each possible pair of characters. The program was coded for the RCA Spectra 70/45. Program performance was evaluated by simulation of line justification in a narrow column measure.