The Grafle script guide

A field guide to recognizing 71 languages and the world's major writing systems at a glance — the same hand-written tips the game teaches when you miss. Jump to a language, or study the classic lookalike pairs below.

Telling the 6 families apart

• Cyrillic vs Independent Scripts. Greek is the classic mix-up — Cyrillic was derived from it (Greek: θ, λ, Σ; Cyrillic: я, и, б, д, ч). Georgian, Armenian and Hebrew live here too, and none of them share Cyrillic's upright, boxy look.
• Cyrillic vs Latin. False friends: Cyrillic в, н, р, с look Latin but sound different. Letters like я, ж, б, д and ч only exist in Cyrillic.
• Arabic Script vs Independent Scripts. Hebrew and Thaana also run right-to-left — but their letters stand apart. Arabic script connects letters like cursive.
• Brahmic / Indic vs East Asian. Brahmic scripts are phonetic — loops, bars and stacked vowel marks. East Asian text is dense square characters or Korean circle-blocks.
• Brahmic / Indic vs Independent Scripts. Ethiopic's leggy symbols and Georgian's vines are standalone alphabets; Brahmic scripts hang from bars or wear stacked vowel marks.
• Arabic Script vs Brahmic / Indic. Ornate hanging calligraphy can look Indic — but Arabic-script text connects into flowing right-to-left strokes with dots above and below.
• East Asian vs Independent Scripts. Square dense characters or circle-blocks are East Asian; Greek, Georgian, Armenian and friends are small phonetic alphabets.
• Arabic Script vs East Asian. Arabic script flows and connects right-to-left; East Asian text is separate square characters or blocks.
• Cyrillic vs East Asian. Cyrillic is a small alphabet with repeated letters like о, а, е; East Asian text is thousands of distinct dense characters.
• Arabic Script vs Cyrillic. Cyrillic sits upright, letter by letter; Arabic script flows together like cursive, right to left.
• Brahmic / Indic vs Cyrillic. Brahmic scripts hang from bars or curl into loops with stacked marks; Cyrillic is plain upright letters, European-style.
• Brahmic / Indic vs Latin. Brahmic letters loop, stack and hang from bars; Latin is the plain alphabet you're reading now.
• East Asian vs Latin. East Asian text is dense characters or syllable blocks; Latin is a small alphabet with spaces between short words.
• Independent Scripts vs Latin. Greek is the usual trap — α, λ and ω aren't Latin letters. Armenian and Georgian also mimic lowercase Latin at a glance, but no letter quite matches.
• Arabic Script vs Latin. Arabic script is connected, flowing, right-to-left; Latin letters stand apart and read left-to-right.