Home › Glossary › Letter Z

Zero-width space

Notation
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An invisible character allowing line breaks without visible separation, used in digital poetry.

Detailed Definition
The zero-width space enables flexible lineation in digital environments without altering visual appearance; in electronic poetry, it supports responsive design or hidden structural cues, blending technical and aesthetic functions.
Example
Example in poetry:
Zero-width spaces (​) appear in digital poetry to control line breaks invisibly; In responsive web poetry, ​ prevents awkward splits; Some poets use ​ for hidden structure; In Unicode experiments, ​ creates invisible caesuras; Though undetectable, ​ affects rendering; In computational poetry, ​ manages text flow.
Additional Notes
Zero-width space: The zero-width space (U+200B) is an invisible Unicode character used for line-break control in digital text; in poetry publishing, it allows hyphenation without visible marks—important for responsive web typography and preserving line integrity across devices.
Also Known As
ZWSP invisible space
Skip to main content