A homoglyph refers to a specific character shape that looks nearly identical to, or completely indistinguishable from, an entirely different character with a completely separate meaning. This visual overlap frequently causes readability issues in font styles where characters like a capital I, a lowercase l, and the number 1 look exactly the same, which can disrupt text-to-speech software and complicate digital tasks like data searching or alphabetical sorting if the incorrect character is typed. A similar lack of distinction can also happen between various types of dashes and the mathematical minus sign.
Furthermore, these deceptive visual similarities occur across different languages and alphabets, such as the visual match between a standard Latin H and a Greek Eta, which, despite looking identical, carry completely different meanings. While this semantic confusion goes unnoticed on a printed page, it creates significant errors in digital environments where text is copied, pasted, or processed by accessibility software that relies on the actual underlying data code rather than just the visual appearance.
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