Almost every theme I’ve worked with has auto-hyphenation turned on as the default setting, which might be OK if it worked better… but it doesn’t. I often see goofy hyphenations with 2-letter syllables split off the rest of a word. So I usually go in there and turn it off.

Of course we should do this in a child theme, but if don’t otherwise need a child theme, then you can just edit style.css – knowing that you’ll have to go back and do so again, after you update the theme. To turn off auto-hyphenation:

  1. Go to Appearance → Editor
  2. By default you’ll already looking at style.css. Use the find feature in your browser (Ctrl-f in Windows, ⌘-f in Mac) to search for hyphen.
  3. Each place you find the word, replace auto with none. You are likely to find these 3 lines of code in 2 or more locations:
    	-webkit-hyphens: auto;
    	-moz-hyphens: auto;
    	hyphens: auto;
    
  4. Click Update File after you’ve replaced all the auto with none.

There you go.