Korean Word Split Test

Splitting Korean Words Across Lines

There are two ways to properly split Korean text across lines (based on Cardinal Rules of Korean-Language Layout by Steven Bammel, president of Korean Consulting & Translation Service):

• Justified where words are allowed to split anywhere within the word
• Aligned left where words are not allowed to split - each word stays together on the same line

The Problem

The default browser action is to split Korean words (as well as Chinese and Japanese) anywhere in the word, which is fine for justified text, but not good for left aligned text. The word-break: keep-all; property, which keeps Korean words from splitting, was added to the CSS3 specification around 2011. As of 2015, all of the latest major browser versions support keep-all.

The problem is the internet browser in Android does not get updated the way other browsers do, which leaves a number of potential site visitors with a browser that doesn’t support keep-all. That could result in some visitors having a slightly less satisfactory experience (if you care about things like typefaces and how text is displayed).

My Solution

My original solution was to wrap every Korean word in <span> </span> tags, and style the tags as: white-space: nowrap;. This keeps the words together. I use a JavaScript plugin (that I created and that’s available on Github) to add the <span> tags when the page loads.

2019 – update: I’m no longer seeing visitors to my site using older versions of the Android browser, so I’ve stopped wrapping Korean words in span tags and started styling Korea text with word-break: keep-all.

Evaluating keep-all & nowrap

You can see the effect keep-all and nowrap CSS settings have by selecting different options and then adjusting the width of the text box to see how the text wraps:

• Align - sets the alignment for the text block to either Left or Justified
• Break - sets the word-break setting for the text block to either normal or keep-all
• White-space - sets the white-space setting for each individual word to either normal or nowrap
• Adjust text box size - slider for increases or decreases the size of the text box

Another Option

There is a jQuery based plugin available on GitHub that will wrap Korean words in a set of span tags.

Korean fonts

I’ve included sixteen different Korean fonts, five that come standard with Microsoft Windows (that will only display correctly if you’re using a Windows machine), and eleven Google fonts.

You can contact me at for questions about coding cross-browser compatible Korean web pages as well about doing business in Korea.

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