Division of Words

This is a history book. The division of words when the words do not exactly fit the register of the line has always been a source of trouble. In the days of the manuscript makers devices such as crowding letters, reducing their size, or omitting them altogether were freely used and words were arbitrarily divided when the scribes so desired. During the greater part of the time every scribe divided as he pleased, often in ways which seem very strange to us, like the Greek custom of dividing always after a vowel and even dividing words of one syllable. With the invention of printing, however, the number of these devices was greatly diminished. It became a matter of spacing out the line or dividing the word. Of course that meant frequent word division and called for a systematization of rules with regard to this division. These rules for division are necessarily based on spelling and syllabication.