A quick research revealed “overflow-wrap: anywhere;” which then gave me the desired outcome of breaking this single oversized word. I would have though that “overflow-wrap: break-word;” would already achieve that … so what I’m overlooking that “anywhere” does differently?

I tested it and it works fine. If you can provide a link here to a demo where it’s not working, I’ll have a look.

Just to clarify something on this previous discussion:

The original demo uses hyphens: auto which I forgot about. Chrome still doesn’t support hyphens: auto. So Firefox adds the hyphen, Chrome does not. I think that’s why the original commenter was saying there is a hyphen visible. I was testing this in Chrome and did not realize Firefox had added that feature. So, yes, you can see a hyphen appear in some browsers.

Hey Jacob! You might want to dig a little deeper with the browser’s DevTools. A super quick copy of your example seems to work out of the box, so maybe there’s something else at play in the rest of the CSS.

So not sure if it’s my machine or what but… even tried >>all: unset;<< and it just refuses to wrap… Found tons of fiddles that just wraps by default… not sure what to do… any suggestions?

Indeed what you and Yongwei Wu are saying is true. This example shows hyphes: auto in action! You can tell by the hyphen itself. A fact that Louis is failing to observe. That is because, the word Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis CAN be hyphenated by the hyphenation algorithm.
But others shouldn’t – i.e. long strings of numbers, some special or repeated characters or mix of them, and for them hyphens won’t work (unless you are Safari, then expect unexpected..)

I is also true, that overflow-wrap: break-word would break the word in this example, as it will break everything but not necessarily in the same or correct way. And there will be no hyphen.

When used together, you can expect even weirder mixed (although sometimes correct) behaviour.

Not sure what you mean…? In what way is it there a hyphen visible?

Hyphens is a different issue altogether. The properties discussed here behave a certain way when hyphenation is not present.

Hyphenation could have been discussed here, but that would cover too much ground. This is part of the “Almanac”, which discusses one feature at a time. You can look up hyphens under its own article (which is linked in the “Related” section).