Forbid hyphenations for a particular text

Question

How can I temporarily forbid hyphenations (or make them more "expensive"), for a particular piece of text? One or two paragraphs.

Answer 1

Following the discussion in How to reduce the number of hyphenation?, you could define an environment that sets some hyphenation-avoiding parameters:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}% http://ctan.org/pkg/lipsum
\newenvironment{nohyphen}
  {\tolerance=1% Also consider setting \pretolerance
   \emergencystretch=\maxdimen%
   \hyphenpenalty=10000%
   \hbadness=10000}% \begin{nohyphen}
  {\par}% \end{nohyphen}
\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
\begin{nohyphen}
\lipsum[1]
\end{nohyphen}
\end{document}

The parameter selection was taken from Justify without hyphenation and, as suggested in the first post, may require some tweaking. More on this, including a discussion regarding the above parameters, is available from the TeX FAQ entry Stopping all hyphenation.

With regards to line-breaking and some of the considerations on TeX's side, also review (La)TeX makes overfull lines:

TeX’s first attempt at breaking lines is performed without even trying hyphenation: TeX sets its “tolerance” of line breaking oddities to the internal value \pretolerance, and sees what happens. If it can’t get an acceptable break, TeX adds the hyphenation points allowed by the current patterns, and tries again using the internal \tolerance value. If this pass also fails, and the internal \emergencystretch value is positive, TeX will try a pass that allows \emergencystretch worth of extra stretchability to the spaces in each line.

In principle, therefore, there are three parameters (other than hyphenation) that you can change: \pretolerance, \tolerance and \emergencystretch.

Answer 2

1. For a short text (a word) use \mbox{content}.

   \documentclass{article}
   \begin{document}\noindent
   \begin{minipage}{2cm}
       content content\\content \mbox{content}
   \end{minipage}
   \end{document}
   

2. For one word through the entire document use \hyphenation{content} in the preamble.

3. For a paragraph or more use \raggedright (this will drop justification, though).

4. For an integer amount of paragraphs you can set penalties:

   \tolerance=1
   \emergencystretch=\maxdimen
   \hyphenpenalty=10000
   \hbadness=10000