Homoglyph

In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar. The designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties.

A synoglyph refers to glyphs that look different but mean the same thing. Synoglyphs are also known informally as display variants.The term homograph is sometimes used synonymously with homoglyph, but in the usual linguistic sense, homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, a property of words, not characters.

In 2008, the Unicode Consortium published its Technical Report #36 on a range of issues deriving from the visual similarity of characters both in single scripts, and similarities between characters in different scripts.

A manifestation of homoglyphic confusion in a historical regard results from the use of a 'y' to represent a 'þ' when setting older English texts in typefaces that do not contain the latter character. It has led in modern times to such phenomena as Ye olde shoppe, implying incorrectly that the word the was formerly written ye /jiː/. For further discussion, see thorn.