17.03 French Typographical Rules—Word division

Divide a word at the end of a line as follows:

• between two consonants (car-gaison, ex-caver, dic-taphone);
• before a consonant separating two vowels (cargai-son, poly-culture);
• between the two parts of a compound (bloc-moteur, coûts-bénéfices);
• between recognizable logical components of a word (électro-statique; trans-action);
• between two vowels in compounds, unless the second vowel belongs to the first part of the compound (extra-ordinaire, ré-unir but oléo-duc).

See 2.04 Compound adjectives; adjectives and participles in compounds(j) for information on the hyphenation of French words used as compound adjectives.

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