A fallback font is a reserve typeface containing symbols for as many Unicode characters as possible. When a display system encounters a character that is not part of the repertoire of any of the other available fonts, a symbol from a fallback font is used instead. Typically, a fallback font will contain symbols representative of the various types of Unicode characters. This should not be confused with a Unicode font, which contains a large number of glyphs that actually contain the existing Unicode characters themselves for a large number of characters, such as GNU Unifont.
Systems that do not offer a fallback font typically display black or white rectangles, question marks, the Unicode Replacement Character (U+FFFD), or nothing at all, in place of missing characters. Placing one or more fallback fonts at the end of a list of preferred fonts ensures that there are no missing characters.