Soft hyphens are a really useful thing to make long words look good on narrow screens, such as mobile screens. TL;DR? Just go to https://unicode.flopp.net/c/00AD and copy the soft hyphen from there, paste it anywhere.
Without soft hyphens:
With soft hypens:
Mac OS X
Where to find them on mac os x? In your browser (we recommend Google Chrome), in the menu bar you should see this:
Drag and drop the soft hyphen into any input field or document.
Shortcuts for Power Users
You can just type Ctrl+Command+Space to open the emoji & symbols window pretty much anywhere.
Pro tipp: Mac OS X lets you switch between a full window and a tooltip, this is handy when your cursor is at the right position in an input field (i.e. in a browser, on a website):

This popup behaviour can be toggled by clicking on the small icon next to the search bar:

And here is a video:
Adding the soft hyphen to the favorites for quicker access in Mac OS X
- Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard
- Check the box beside “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar” a.k.a. “Show Keyboard, Emoji & Symbol Viewers in menu bar”.
- Click on the keyboard icon that has now been placed on your menu bar.
- Choose Show Character Viewer (a.k.a. Show Emoji & Symbols worked)
- In the search box of the pop-up window that just appeared, type “soft hyphen” (without the quotes). If the pop-up is shrunken (accomplished by clicking the keyboard icon in its upper corner), then you will not be able to proceed. Several characters may appear and the first looks like a hyphen, but is a soft hyphen. In that case, click on the keyboard icon to switch back to the full mode.
- When you’ve found the soft hyphen, click on it. It becomes selected and to the right you see the name “SOFT HYPHEN”.
- Click on Add to Favorites
- You can now close this window or add the character directly to wherever your cursor currently is positioned.
Microsoft Windows
There is really poor support for non-printable characters in Microsoft Windows. However you can go to https://unicode-table.com/en/00AD/ and copy the shy hyphen from there and insert it anywhere, for example in a form field on a website in the Chrome browser.