Lookalike letters
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ES (U+0441)
The Cyrillic letter es, drawn exactly like a Latin c.
- Codepoint
U+0441- Also written as
u0441\u0441с- Category
- Lookalike letters
- Removed by default
- No
- Governing option
- Lookalike letters
--confusables - Can be load-bearing
- No
Copy and paste U+0441
To copy and paste CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ES (U+0441), 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, 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`); inside a mixed-script word like "сontract" it becomes Latin "c". 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. 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?
Fewer than the size of the table suggests: a lookalike only counts inside a word that also contains an ASCII letter or digit, so Turkish "kırmızı" and ordinary Cyrillic or Greek prose are left alone. A word that does mix scripts is still rewritten ("ıPad" would come back as "iPad"), which is why the option 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.
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