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Another fun problem of hyphenation in English, that I didn't see on my read through this, is that how something is hyphenated may depend on how the word is used. Easy example is "record", as a noun it will hyphenate differently than it will as a verb.

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I’m trying to figure out when “record” would ever be hyphenated. If it doesn’t fit on one line, just put it on the next, right? No need to do some weird “rec-ord” / “re-cord” hyphenation.

If you’re justifying text, there may be more constraints like not wanting a big change in interword spacing between lines or avoiding spaces lining up across lines. These constraints might apply to the current line or to following lines affected by your choice of where to break.

Though I think the main reason would be limited horizontal space, e.g. a table cell or narrow newspaper column.

To add to this, the point it is it trying a full page optimization, not just single lines or words. Will it be likely? Probably not, but it can happen.

And I only used "record" as it was the example given to me. I'm sure there are others. Is a good example for how/why counting syllables can be harder than folks think. Well, kind of a good example; since you will get the right count, regardless.

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