Characters that look alike and are not the same.
Unicode is full of near-identical characters with different meanings. Picking the wrong one still looks right on screen and quietly breaks search, sorting, screen readers and anything that compares text. These pages set the lookalikes side by side and say which one is correct when.
Check mark symbols compared
Four ticks that look alike and behave differently. Which one is plain text, which one is an emoji, and which one breaks when you paste it elsewhere.
Hyphen, en dash, em dash and minus
Four horizontal lines with four different jobs. Which one joins a compound, which one spans a range, which one sets off a clause, and which one subtracts.
Heart symbols compared
Why one heart stays black and another turns red by itself, what a variation selector does, and which heart survives a paste into a username.
Degree symbol lookalikes
Four raised circles that are not interchangeable. Only one is the degree sign, and the wrong one breaks search, sorting and screen readers.
Micro sign against Greek mu
Two characters that look identical and are not the same. Which one belongs in micrometres, which belongs in an equation, and why normalisation quietly merges them.
Multiplication signs and crosses
The arithmetic operator, the letter, the close button and the ballot cross are four characters. Using the letter x is the one that quietly breaks things.
If you would rather type a character than compare it, the how-to guides cover Windows, macOS, Word and Google Docs. For everything at once, open the full reference.