[9.2] How can I make whole phrases into hyperlinks?

The mouseWord function only picks up individual words, delimited by spaces. In order to gather several words together into a single hypertext link, you need to separate them with characters other than a space.

On the Macintosh, a hard-space character can be inserted by pressing option-space (in some fonts this may look different to a normal space). In Windows (*******). The hard-space looks just like a space, but Director interprets it as a non-space and yokes together the words on either side into a single "word":

put "one two three" into blah
-- this ^ is a hard space

put word 1 of blah
-- "one two"

You can however compare such a "word" to a phrase containing ordinary spaces and it will still match:

put word 1 of blah = "one two" -- this uses an ordinary space
-- 1

Adjacent words may also be combined by using any other non-space character as a separator. This character can be disguised by setting it to the background colour of the field, though it will still show up with certain ink effects.