Character Conversion in TEAS Plus U.S. Trademark Applications

For U.S. trademark applications filed via TEAS Plus (i.e., on or after July 18, 2005) that include certain characters, the "word mark" field displayed in the Office's various databases may reflect a slightly different mark than what you actually filed. This is because some standard characters must be converted to other characters, or slightly modified, to ensure proper communication across different databases.

Specifically, (1) the € symbol is converted to ‘Euro’; (2) the ‰ symbol is converted to ‘0/00’; (3) Œ is converted to ‘OE’; (4) œ is converted to ‘oe’; and (5) some characters having a diacritical mark (e.g., an umlaut, accent, or cedilla) are converted to remove the diacritical mark; e.g., Ú is converted to U, ÿ is converted to y, and ç is converted to c. " For a complete listing of characters requiring conversion, click here.

For searching purposes, the U.S. patent and Trademark Office is warning that you "should not rely on the word mark field if any of those specific characters are part of the mark (It is not a problem for the characters identified at (5), above)." According to their latest searching instructions, only the following characters are searchable on TESS:

! # $ % & * + - . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : < = > ? @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N
O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ^ ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
~ € ‚ ƒ „ … † ‡ ˆ ‰ Š ‹ Œ • – — ™ š › œ Ÿ ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª " ¬ ® ¯ ° ± ² ³ ´
µ ¶ · ¸ ¹ º " ¼ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß à á â ã ä å æ
ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ

However, some of these searchable characters have special meanings on TESS. For example, the asterisk is a truncation character for the BI and TI indexes. For searches, enclose in quotes any characters that have special meanings to TESS. For example, to search for all marks containing the asterisk character in the word mark, the search *"*"*[BI] can be performed. Similarly, the search *"?"*[BI] will retrieve all marks containing the question mark.

Not all characters can be searched on TESS. The following characters cannot be searched on TESS. Search strings that include these characters, will provide undesirable results:

" ' ( ) , ; [ \ ] _ { } ‘ ’ " " ˜

Other formatting characters that cannot be printed, such as the line feed, tab, and backspace characters, also cannot be searched on TESS.

TESS is not case sensitive. UPPER CASE characters are equivalent to lower case characters for searching. Either UPPER CASE or lower case characters may be used for your search terms.