Lookalike letters
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IE (U+0435)
The Cyrillic letter ie, drawn exactly like a Latin e.
- Codepoint
U+0435- Also written as
u0435\u0435е- Category
- Lookalike letters
- Removed by default
- No
- Governing option
- Lookalike letters
--confusables - Can be load-bearing
- No
Copy and paste U+0435
To copy and paste CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IE (U+0435), press the button: the character itself goes to your clipboard, and Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) pastes it anywhere you can type.
Where it comes from
Cyrillic text; and in Latin words, from mixed keyboard layouts or deliberate substitution.
Why it matters
E is the most common letter in English, so it is the most productive target for a homoglyph swap: one substitution per word is almost always available.
Before and after
One letter from another alphabet, and the word no longer matches itself.
The character is shown as a labelled chip so you can see where it sits. In your text it draws nothing at all.
When it is legitimate
In Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian and other Cyrillic-script languages.
How to remove it
Turn on Lookalike letters (`--confusables`); inside a mixed-script word like "rеport" it becomes Latin "e". A word that is all Cyrillic is left alone.
Working in a file rather than a paste? The document report for .docx, .odt and .html finds it inside the file, together with hidden runs and tracked changes, without you having to open it. If the question is what the rest of the writing does rather than what this one character does, count the tell words and phrases per thousand words and see where each habit sits, with no score and no claim about who wrote the text.
Is it an AI watermark?
Not a watermark
No. A swapped e is a human intervention (filter evasion, spoofing, or a stego payload), not a model artefact.
No connection to machine-generated text. It comes from software, from a keyboard, or from a person.
Questions
Is this how moderation filters get bypassed?
It is one of the ways. A banned word with one Cyrillic letter is a different string, so a literal blocklist misses it while a reader does not.
Does normalisation fix it?
No. NFC and NFKC do not map Cyrillic letters to Latin ones; they are genuinely different letters. Only an explicit confusables mapping changes them.
Check your own text
Paste anything into the cleaner to see every hidden character it contains, with position, codepoint and what happens to each one. Nothing is uploaded.
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