CSS: How to Prevent Line Breaks in Text

In web design, controlling text layout is essential for a clean, consistent user experience. Sometimes, you may want to prevent a line break so that a specific word, sentence, or inline element stays on a single line.

In this blog, we’ll explore:

• ✅ Why you’d want to prevent line breaks
• 🛠️ CSS property to prevent line wrapping
• 🧪 Practical examples
• 🧠 Extra tips for fine-tuned control

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✅ Why Prevent Line Breaks?

Preventing line breaks can be helpful when:

• You don’t want a product name or brand to split
• You’re styling buttons or navigation menus
• You’re working with labels, icons, or inline elements that must stay together
• You want to avoid awkward hyphenation in responsive layouts

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🛠️ CSS Property: white-space: nowrap

The most direct way to stop text from breaking to a new line is:

white-space: nowrap;

This tells the browser to keep the content on a single line, even if it overflows.

🔧 Example:

.nobr {
  white-space: nowrap;
}

<p class="nobr">ThisIsAVeryLongWordThatShouldNotBreak</p>

Result: The paragraph content will stay on one line, and overflow instead of wrapping.

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📦 Use Case: Button or Label Text

.button {
  white-space: nowrap;
  padding: 10px 20px;
}

<button class="button">Do Not Break</button>

This ensures the button text remains on one line regardless of screen size (unless you also control overflow).

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✅ Combining with Overflow Handling

If you’re preventing line breaks, you might also want to handle overflow gracefully:

.nobr {
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

This combination will hide the overflowing text and show an ellipsis (...) when the text is too long.

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💡 Prevent Breaks Between Words

If you want to prevent breaking between two specific words, use a non-breaking space ( ) in HTML:

<span>OpenAI&nbsp;ChatGPT</span>

This ensures “OpenAI” and “ChatGPT” stay on the same line.

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🧠 Summary

Goal	CSS or HTML Solution
Prevent line break	white-space: nowrap;
Hide overflowed content	overflow: hidden;
Show ellipsis	text-overflow: ellipsis;
Prevent break between words	  in HTML

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📌 Final Thoughts

Using white-space: nowrap is a simple yet powerful technique in CSS. Whether you’re managing buttons, menus, or any inline text — controlling line breaks can significantly improve your layout and readability.