Some characters are replaced by question marks!

All of a sudden my iMac (OS X 10.5.1 Leopard) is displaying question marks for some special characters.
For example, on internet, look up a word "pediment" in Yahoo! Dictionary ( http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/pediment)... Instead of showing the "dot" symbol to identify a syllabus break, it shows question marks as ped?i?ment, and instead of showing c with a little squiggle underneath for a word facade (within the definition of pediment), it shows fa?ade.
I did not have this problem on my iMac on Tuesday (01/29/08) morning and I have not installed anything other than the Apple updates.
I tried with FireFox and Safari, and both show the same thing. Then I went and checked my husband's iMac (OS X 10.5.1 Leopard) and it has a same problem, so I know it is not just my iMac.
Then (yes, there is more...) I started to work on my Word document and tried to insert "symbol" from insert on the Toolbar... many of my symbol fonts (Symbol, Osaka, etc) has question marks replacing special characters.
Please help! I am unable to complete my work without these special characters!!

Well, I went to the Yahoo! Dictionary "Pediment" and it said it was set to Default which is set to Western (ISO Latin 1), so I assumed it was Western (ISO Latin 1). But when I click on Western (ISO Latin 1), the pages appear what it's supposed to look like with special characters... What does this mean?
I reset all the settings; I chose something else as default, quit Safari, opened it and chose Western (ISO Latin 1) as a default to see if it changes anything... No change. It says my default is Western (ISO Latin 1), but it seems not.
I am officially confused and have no clue what to do...??????!!!!!
On the bright side, at least I can get my work done, even if I have to change the encoding one page at a time... Thanks.

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