Writing systems without word boundaries

Writing systems without word boundaries do not have explicit, systematic visible markers to distinguish the ending of one word and the beginning of another. In the ancient period until around 1000 AD, alphabets were written scriptio continua without spaces or special marks separating words. These cases of continuous writing are discussed there.

Many writing systems use spaces to delimit words. Other writing systems, such as Ethiopic, have a specific grapheme that is used to delimit each word. Similar markers were used in the early history of alphabetic writing. To invisibly mark word boundaries for use in computers, it is feasible for some writing systems to make use of the Unicode character zero-width space.