Nonletterslijke

Nonletterslijke is a neologism used in typography and linguistics to describe glyphs that are not letters but resemble letters in appearance or function. The term combines English non-letter with a Dutch suffix meaning "like," signaling a category of symbols that can be visually mistaken for alphabetic characters. In practice, nonletterslijke include digits that resemble letters in certain fonts (0 and O, 1 and l), ligatures or stylistic variants, and homoglyphs from other scripts that look like Latin letters.

Nonletterslijke is not a widely standardized category. In formal Unicode documentation and academic usage, terms such as non-letter characters, digits, punctuation, diacritics, or homoglyphs are preferred. The concept appears mainly in niche discussions about font design, optical character recognition, accessibility, and security, where visual confusability between symbols can lead to misreading or spoofing.

Relation to Unicode and processing: Many potential nonletterslige glyphs have distinct Unicode properties, but classification depends on the script and context. The idea highlights issues in legibility, text normalization, search, and human–machine interaction. Because nonletterslijke is a nonstandard term, most references favor more established terminology while acknowledging the underlying problem of visual similarity between characters.