Sérstöfum

Sérstöfum is an Icelandic term used to refer to special characters or glyphs—characters that are not part of a basic set of letters and digits. It encompasses diacritical marks used in Icelandic, punctuation, symbols, and characters from other scripts that may appear in digital text. The concept is important in typography and digital text processing because such characters affect encoding, rendering, and search.

The word is formed from the prefix sér- meaning “special” and stöfum, a form related to the word for “character” or “glyph” in Icelandic. In practice, discussions of sérstöfum surround how software handles Unicode encodings, font support, input methods, and locale rules, as well as how strings are validated or filtered—for example, password policies requiring at least one special character.

In Icelandic contexts, properly supporting sérstöfum is essential for accessibility, representation of loanwords, and preserving correct diacritics in names and places. Many modern systems use Unicode to encode sérstöfum, and developers implement normalization, escaping, and font fallback to ensure correct display across platforms.

Related topics include Unicode, ASCII, diacritics, typography, and locale-aware text processing.