Lookalike letters
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ES (U+0441)
The Cyrillic letter es, drawn exactly like a Latin c.
- Codepoint
U+0441- Category
- Lookalike letters
- Removed by default
- No
- Governing option
- Lookalike letters
--confusables - Can be load-bearing
- No
Where it comes from
Cyrillic text, mixed layouts, and deliberate substitution in domains and usernames.
Why it matters
Like the other lookalikes it makes two identical-looking strings compare unequal, which is enough to defeat a blocklist, a search or a deduplication pass.
Before and after
The leading letter is Cyrillic es. The word is not the word it appears to be.
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 every Cyrillic-script language, where it is simply the letter es and has nothing to do with Latin c.
How to remove it
Turn on Lookalike letters (`--confusables`); it becomes Latin "c".
Is it an AI watermark?
Not a watermark
No. Homoglyphs are placed by people and by keyboards, never as a model signature.
No connection to machine-generated text. It comes from software, from a keyboard, or from a person.
Questions
How many lookalikes does Ghostchars know about?
The mapping has 1,513 entries, generated from Unicode’s own confusables.txt rather than hand-picked, so it covers Greek, Armenian, Cherokee, fullwidth forms and mathematical alphabets as well as Cyrillic.
Are there false positives?
Yes, by design: the mapping is aggressive, and it will turn Turkish dotless ı and genuine non-Latin text into Latin. That is why it is opt-in.
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.