Free generator, copy and paste
Zalgo text generator glitch text, carefully
Zalgo piles dozens of tiny marks above and below each letter until the text looks corrupted. Pick a strength, copy, paste.
- glitch, medium
- glitch, light
- glitch, heavy
- dripping
- wavy strike
- double slash
Updated · strikethroughtext.online
How zalgo text works
Every result above is built from ordinary letters plus combining marks, the same kind of character this site uses for strikethrough. A combining mark has no width and attaches to the letter before it. One mark gives you an accent. Fifteen marks stacked on the same letter spill out of the line in every direction, and that’s zalgo.
The generator picks marks from three pools: ones that sit above the letter, ones that cut through it, and ones that hang below. The strength decides how many it takes from each.
| Strength | Marks per letter | Looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 1 to 2 | a faint shimmer, still easy to read |
| Medium | 2 to 7 | clearly glitched, readable in a short phrase |
| Heavy | 9 to 20 | the full corrupted look, spills into nearby lines |
| Dripping | 3 to 8, all below | letters that seem to melt downward |
Where it works, and where it gets trimmed
Because it’s plain Unicode, zalgo pastes anywhere text goes. A few places push back:
- Character limits. Heavy zalgo can cost twenty characters per letter. A short word can blow through an X post or a bio limit. Use light or medium for anything with a limit.
- Mark limits. Some platforms cap how many combining marks one letter may carry, and quietly drop the rest. Heavy text can come out looking like medium.
- Usernames. Many sites reject or strip combining marks in handles and display names to stop impersonation and layout abuse.
- Overlapping lines. Heavy zalgo spills over the text above and below it. In a busy chat, it can cover other people’s messages. Use it sparingly there.
Good uses
- A creepy title for a Halloween post or a horror story.
- A “the system is breaking” moment in a joke or a game chat.
- A glitch-style word in a video caption or a thumbnail mock-up.
Keep it to a word or a short phrase. A whole paragraph of zalgo is unreadable, and readers scroll past it.
Reading it back
Zalgo is hard on screen readers, which may read out every mark. If the words matter, put a plain version next to it. To clean zalgo you’ve received, paste it into the zalgo remover: it deletes every glitch mark the generator can produce and keeps real accented letters intact.
Why “zalgo”?
The name comes from a mid-2000s meme from the Something Awful forums, where ordinary comic strips were edited so the characters slowly turned into eyeless horrors, with captions about “Zalgo” coming. The corrupted text that went with them took the name, and it’s stuck ever since.
Questions people ask
What is zalgo text?
Text with many combining marks stacked on each letter, so the marks spill above and below the line and look like a glitch. The name comes from a mid-2000s internet meme. It’s also called glitch text, cursed text or creepy text.
Is cursed text the same as zalgo text?
Mostly, yes. Cursed text, crazy text and scary text generators usually make zalgo, sometimes mixed with gothic or upside-down letters. Heavy and dripping strengths here give the cursed look; light is closer to a subtle glitch.
Where can I use zalgo text?
Anywhere that accepts Unicode text: Discord, X, TikTok and YouTube comments, most chat apps. Some sites limit how many marks a letter can carry and trim heavy zalgo, and a few block it in usernames.
Why does the same text always glitch the same way?
The randomness is seeded by your text, so the result doesn’t jump around while you type and you can come back to the same output. Change one letter and the whole pattern changes.
How do I turn zalgo text back to normal?
Paste it into the remove formatting tool on this site. It deletes every zalgo mark and leaves real accents like é and ñ alone.
Is zalgo text bad for accessibility?
Yes, quite. Screen readers can read every mark aloud, turning one word into a long string of noise. Use it for a short joke or a title, never for information people need.