How do I find hidden characters in Word?

Turn on Show/Hide to see spaces and formatting marks, then use Find and Replace with Word's ^u codes to catch the characters Show/Hide never shows, like zero-width spaces. Text copied from ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or a web page can carry these characters into a Word document, and Remove AI Tells treats them as a sign the text was pasted rather than typed.

Step 1: Turn on Show/Hide

Click the paragraph mark button on the Home tab, or press Ctrl+Shift+8 (Cmd+8 on a Mac). Normal spaces show as small dots and non-breaking spaces show as a small raised circle. Zero-width characters still stay invisible, which is why step 2 matters.

Step 2: Search by code

Press Ctrl+H and search for each code below. Word tells you how many it replaced, so a count above zero means the character was there.

• ^s non-breaking space: replace with a normal space
• ^u8239 narrow no-break space: replace with a normal space
• ^u8203 zero-width space: replace with nothing
• ^u8288 word joiner: replace with nothing
• ^u65279 zero-width no-break space (byte order mark): replace with nothing
• ^- soft hyphen: replace with nothing

Leave zero-width joiners (^u8205) alone in text with emoji or in languages such as Arabic or Hindi, where they are part of normal writing.

Step 3: Check for hidden text formatting

Characters are one thing; whole lines can also be hidden. Go to File, Info, Check for Issues, Inspect Document, and run the Hidden Text check. To reveal white or tiny text, work on a copy, select all, set the font color to Automatic and pick a normal font size.

The faster option

Paste the text into the free Remove AI Tells scanner. It counts invisible characters, flags instruction-like lines that could be a hidden prompt, and gives you clean text to paste back. More detail: how to remove hidden characters from AI text.