Question

I have a <div> with hard-coded width. Inside the <div> are several hundred <span> tags. Can I wrap the spans so that line spacing is correct and wrapping is between spans? I use word-wrap: break-word and it looks a mess.

Here is pseudo code.

span {
  margin: 2px;
  border: 1px dotted #cccccc;
  padding: 4px 10px 4px 10px; 
    }
div {
  padding: 5px;
  margin: 5px;
  border: 1px solid #cccccc;
  width: 800px;
  word-wrap: break-word;
}

<div>
  <span>stuff</span>
  <span>more stuff</span>
  <span>even more stuff</span>
  .
  .
  .
</div>

Thanks!

EDIT for clarification: There should be multiple spans on each line, and wrapping should be between spans.

Answer 1

EDIT (2017): Flexbox with wrap display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap is compatible with IE10+ (and Android 4.4+) and will allow versatile alignments both horizontally (justified, aligned to the left or right, space-around, centered) and vertically (align-items) with also versatile spacing between lines (align-content… if an height is set, in general).
Bonus: no ~4px whitespace between items to take care of as with inline-block. You do pretty much what you want: no gutter, flex: 1 1 auto or padding: 1rem for example
Cheatsheet for Flexbox on CSS Tricks
/EDIT

Span doesn’t seem very semantic, maybe use an unordered list?

If I understood well your problem, you want as many span per line that’ll fit but no span begininng on a line and finishing in another line?
Then the following fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/MRR6P/ will do the trick. Try

span {
  line-height: 1.8;
  word-wrap: normal;
  display: inline-block;
}