In a recent paper1 the authors have shown that it is possible to determine the possible parts of speech of English words from an analysis of the written form. This determination depends upon the ability to determine the number of graphic syllables in the word. It is natural, then, to speculate as to the nature of graphic syllabification and the relation of this phenomenon to the practice of word-breaking in dictionaries and style manuals. It is not at all clear at the start that dictionary wordbreaking is subject to any fixed structure. In fact, certain forms cannot be broken uniquely in isolation since the dictionary provides different forms depending upon whether the word is used as a noun or a verb. However, it is shown in this paper that letter strings can be decomposed into 3 sets of roughly the same size in the following manner: in the first, strings are never broken in English words; in the second, the strings are always broken in English words; and in the third, both situations occur. Rules for breaking vowel strings are obtained by a study of the CVC forms. Breaks involving consonants can be determined by noting whether or not the consonant string occurs in penultimate position with the final c. The final e in compounds also serves to identify the forms that are generally split off from the rest of the word. A thorough analysis is made of the accuracy of the rules given when applied to the 12,000 words of the Government Printing Office Style Manual Supplement on word-breaking. Comparisons are also drawn between this source and several American dictionaries on the basis of a random sample of 500 words.