Homoglyph Detector: Find Cyrillic and Greek Look-alikes
Check text for homoglyphs: Cyrillic and Greek letters that look like Latin ones, as used in spoofed domain names and phishing. Flags mixed-script words and lists each look-alike with its script and code point. Nothing is uploaded.
0 characters, 0 bytes
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About the homoglyph detector
This page checks text for homoglyphs: letters from another script that look like Latin letters. The Cyrillic а (U+0430) and the Latin a (U+0061) are drawn identically in most fonts, so раypal.com written with a Cyrillic р and а looks like a well-known domain but is a different address. Paste a link, a sender name, a user name or a whole message, and every suspicious word is listed with its look-alike letters marked. The check runs on this page: nothing is uploaded and your text never leaves your device.
How to check text for homoglyphs
Steps
- Paste or type the text into the input box.
- Read the report. Each flagged word is shown with its look-alike letters highlighted, a verdict, the scripts it uses and, for each look-alike, its code point and the Latin letter it imitates.
- The note under the output says how many words were flagged. Copy or download the report to keep it.
What the verdicts mean
Mixed script
The word contains letters from more than one script, such as Latin and Cyrillic. Ordinary words almost never do this, so a mixed-script word is the strongest sign of spoofing. It is the same signal browsers use to decide whether to show an internationalised domain name in its Unicode form or as xn-- Punycode.
All look-alikes
The word is written entirely in one non-Latin script, but every letter is a look-alike of a Latin letter, so it reads as a Latin word: Cyrillic сор looks exactly like "cop". The report gives the Latin reading. Genuine Russian or Greek words can trigger this verdict when they happen to use only such letters, so treat it as a prompt to look closer rather than proof.
Clean
Words in a single script that are not made only of look-alikes are not listed. Digits and punctuation are ignored when the scripts of a word are counted.
Limits of the check
The table covers the common Cyrillic and Greek look-alikes of Latin letters, which account for most spoofed links and names in practice. It does not cover every confusable character in Unicode, such as look-alikes from Armenian, Cherokee or mathematical letters; for those, first fold styled letters to plain ones with the Fancy letters to plain operation of the Unicode normalizer, then check again. To inspect the raw bytes of a suspicious string, paste it into Text to Binary, or decode a suspicious link with the URL Encoder and Decoder.
Open-source credits
- The detector is implemented in-house for this site and uses no third-party library.
- It follows the idea of Unicode Technical Standard #39 (Unicode Security Mechanisms): mixed-script detection and whole-script confusables. The look-alike table is a curated subset of the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek entries of the TR39 confusables data, not the full file.
- Scripts are identified with the Unicode Script property through the browser's JavaScript regular expression engine (ECMA-262).