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In searching to resolve this issue I have found several lists of codes that appear to be the same special character, but give different codes from each other. And since I can't seem to type them, I can't verify if any of them is the correct code for a domain name.

The domain name URL for purposes of this inquiry is the http://sǝx.com IDN. If you paste that in, it goes to a landing page; but how would you TYPE it in?

In comparison, £.com (symbol for the British Pound) is pretty straight forward: you just hold down the Alt key, tap 0, tap 1, tap 6, and tap 3 — all on the numpad — and then release the Alt key and press enter. Bam! You just created the £ needed to go to the £.com website (which resolves and redirects to poundsymbol.com).

But how do you do this for the "ǝ" in sǝx.com? The domain name converts to "xn--sx-73a.com" in your browser once you press enter, so I thought that might give me a clue to typing in the character. But if so I missed it.

However, in researching the "ǝ" symbol I ran across this URL:

http://easycaptures.com/fs/uploaded/1110/6435628828.jpg

(That's an image of it, since when I paste it in this editor it ends up like this instead: ?text=%C7%9D)

Anyway, that URL implies that there are many different versions of the letter available in several different character sets. If so, would they all work the same in a browser for resolving to the same domain name? If so, is any particular character set easier to work with on a standard US keyboard?

There are also other URLs that seem to give different information about the actual code for the letter, such as wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C6%8F

(and others, but I'm at my link limit)

While they all look similar, I am wondering if the distinction between them is enough to prevent the URL from resolving properly based on which exact character from which exact character set is deployed.

And again, I am only unable to test this more as I cannot ascertain how to type most of them into the browser - particularly if the code has a letter, as that seems to start triggering shortcuts on the browser instead of considering it as URL input.

Please help me decipher the mystery (to me) of the "ǝ" (apparently also called schwa) and how I would find and type the correct code to get to "sǝx.com" or "pǝt.com" or any website that included "ǝ" in its name.

Thanks in advance!

Webmaster
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  • Look into [punycode](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode) – fpg1503 Nov 05 '16 at 22:49
  • That makes sense of why they are structured the way they are, but it kind of feels like looking at the alphabet instead of a dictionary; not getting the distinctions. Thanks, though. – Webmaster Nov 05 '16 at 23:57
  • Found the actual latin character (it's NOT the schwa character), but absolutely cannot figure out how to type the thing into a regular (US) keyboard. Moreover, it seems that there are two characters that work interchangeably in the domain name. One is rotated 90 degrees clockwise: http://graphemica.com/ǝ and the other is flipped 90 degrees horizontally: http://graphemica.com/Ǝ Anybody know how to type either one of these into a browser address bar? (Note that Alt+0477 and Alt+0398 works [using numeric keypad] in Wordpad but not Notepad) Thanks! – – Webmaster Nov 08 '16 at 23:14

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