In typography, a homoglyph is one of a pair of characters with shapes that are visually identical or nearly identical. The term 'homograph' is sometimes used synonymously, but it must be noted that the typographic sense of this term is not included in the definition normally applied in linguistic discourse. In that context, homography is a property of words, not characters, and homographs are a type of homonym. References to characters in terms of the similarity of their appearance might therefore best be made without reliance on specialized vocabulary, for example, simply as 'visually similar' or 'visually confusable' characters. The Unicode Consortium has recently published its Technical Report #36 [[1]] on a range of issues deriving from the visual similarity of characters both in single scripts, and similarities between characters in different scripts. Typographic work Typography (from the Greek words typos = form and grapho = write) is the art and technique of selecting and arranging type styles, point sizes, line lengths, line leading, character spacing, and word spacing for typeset applications. ... Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words that have the same phonetic form (homophones) or orthographic form (homographs) but unrelated meaning. ... In computing, Unicode provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers. ...

The Unicode character chart contains many strongly homoglyphic characters. These present security risks in a variety of situations (addressed in UTR#36) and have recently been called into particular attention in regard to internationalized domain names. Deliberately substituting one character with another that cannot be readily distinguished from it, allows the spoofing of one domain name by another which apears as though it were a homograph of the first one, but in fact is not. The most notable such exploitation is a phishing attack. In many fonts the Greek letter 'Α', Cyrillic letter 'А' and the Latin letter 'A' are visually identical, as are the Latin letter 'a' and the Cyrillic letter 'а'. A domain name can be spoofed simply by substituting one of these forms for another in a separately registered name. There are also many examples of near-homoglyphs within the same script such as 'í' (with an acute accent) and 'i'. When discussing this specific security issue, any two sequences of similar characters may be assessed in terms of its potential to be taken as a "homograph pair" (noting again that this term may, itself, cause confusion). Example of Arabic IDN Example of Chinese IDN An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non_ASCII characters. ... This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from Charter One Bank, attempts to trick users into giving away their account information by confirming it at the phishers linked website. ... In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of character designs. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ...

Efforts are underway by TLD registries and Web browser designers to minimize the risks of homoglyphic confusion to the fullest extent possible. Relevant documentation will be found both on the developers' Web sites, and on an IDN Forum [[2]] provided by ICANN. In the domain name system on the Internet there is a need for databases to be kept of which domain name maps to which IP address. ... Web browser shortcuts on an Apple computer A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ... ICANN (pronounced I can) is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ...

Historically, the near-homoglyphs of y and þ in old English script has led to the mistaken supposition that the word "The" was formerly written and pronounced as "Ye", as in "þe olde shoppe." Ye has several uses: Ye was a city in ancient China. ...