Duplicate characters in Unicode

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (March 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Unicode has a certain amount of duplication of characters. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are canonically equivalent. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.

Unless two characters are canonically equivalent, they are not "duplicate" in the narrow sense. There is, however, room for disagreement on whether two Unicode characters really encode the same grapheme in cases such as the U+00B5 µ MICRO SIGN versus U+03BC μ GREEK SMALL LETTER MU.

This should be clearly distinguished from Unicode characters that are rendered as identical glyphs or near-identical glyphs (homoglyphs), either because they are historically cognate (such as Greek Η vs. Latin H) or because of coincidental similarity (such as Greek Ρ vs. Latin P, or Greek Η vs. Cyrillic Н, or the following homoglyph sextuplet: astronomical symbol for "Sun" ☉, "circled dot operator" ⊙, the Gothic letter WIKI