Two character sequences are said to be canonical equivalents if their full canonical decompositions are identical.

• For example, the sequences and <ö> are canonical equivalents. Canonical equivalence is a Unicode property. It should not be confused with language-specific collation or matching, which may add other equivalencies. For example, in Swedish, ö is treated as a completely different letter from o and is collated after z. In German, ö is weakly equivalent to oe and is collated with oe. In English, ö is just an o with a diacritic that indicates that it is pronounced separately from the previous letter (as in coöperate) and is collated with o.
• By definition, all canonical-equivalent sequences are also compatibility-equivalent sequences.