Cyrillic to Latin Homoglyph Converter

What are homoglyphs?

Homoglyphs are characters from different writing systems that look identical or nearly identical to each other. For example, the Cyrillic letter "А" (U+0410) appears visually indistinguishable from the Latin letter "A" (U+0041), despite being completely different Unicode characters. This visual similarity exists because many Cyrillic letters were historically derived from Greek and Latin alphabets.

Why do Cyrillic-Latin homoglyphs matter?

The visual similarity between Cyrillic and Latin characters creates both challenges and opportunities. In cybersecurity, homoglyphs are exploited in phishing attacks where malicious URLs use Cyrillic lookalikes to impersonate legitimate domains. In text processing, mixed-script content can cause sorting, searching, and indexing issues. Understanding and detecting these character substitutions is essential for security researchers, content moderators, and developers working with multilingual text.

How does homoglyph conversion work?

Homoglyph conversion replaces characters from one script with their visually similar counterparts from another script. This tool maps Cyrillic characters to their Latin equivalents based on visual appearance rather than phonetic value. For instance, the Cyrillic "Р" (which sounds like "R") converts to the Latin "P" because they look alike, not because they represent the same sound.

Tool description

This Cyrillic to Latin homoglyph converter transforms text containing Cyrillic characters into visually similar Latin equivalents. The tool uses a comprehensive mapping database covering multiple Cyrillic-based alphabets including Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Mongolian scripts. The conversion prioritizes visual similarity, making the output appear as close to the original as possible while using only Latin characters.

Examples

Features

• Converts all Cyrillic alphabets including Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Central Asian variants
• Uses perfect homoglyphs where characters are visually identical (А→A, С→C, О→O)
• Applies close approximations for characters with high visual similarity
• Preserves non-Cyrillic characters including Latin letters, numbers, and punctuation
• Supports extended Cyrillic including historical and rare characters

Use cases

• Analyzing potentially malicious text for homoglyph-based spoofing attempts
• Normalizing mixed-script content for consistent text processing
• Detecting Cyrillic character injection in usernames, URLs, or domain names
• Converting Cyrillic text for systems that only support Latin characters
• Research and educational purposes in linguistics and typography

Supported character sets

Perfect homoglyphs (visually identical):

• Uppercase: А→A, В→B, С→C, Е→E, Н→H, І→I, Ј→J, К→K, М→M, О→O, Р→P, Ѕ→S, Т→T, Х→X, У→Y
• Lowercase: а→a, с→c, е→e, і→i, ј→j, о→o, р→p, ѕ→s, х→x, у→y

Close homoglyphs (high visual similarity):

• With diacritics: Ё→Ë, Ї→Ï, ё→ë, ї→ï
• Kazakh/Mongolian: Ү→Y, Қ→K, Ң→H, Ғ→F

Approximate homoglyphs (moderate similarity):

• Shape-based: Б→6, Г→r, З→3, Ч→4, Ш→W
• Composite: Ы→bl, Ю→io, Я→ᴙ

Conversion details

The converter processes text character by character, checking each against the homoglyph mapping tables in priority order:

1. Perfect homoglyphs – Exact visual matches between Cyrillic and Latin
2. Close homoglyphs – Characters with minor visual differences, often using diacritics
3. Approximate homoglyphs – Best visual approximation using available characters
4. Passthrough – Characters not found in mappings are preserved unchanged

This layered approach ensures maximum visual fidelity while providing fallbacks for all Cyrillic characters.