Glitch Text Generator — cursed, corrupted and Zalgo text
Stack combining marks on your letters until they fall apart, then copy the result anywhere.
Glitch text — also called Zalgo text, cursed text or corrupted text — is ordinary writing with
Unicode combining marks piled on top of it. The letters stay exactly where they were; what changes is the
cloud of accents, strokes and hooks that grows out of them. Because none of it is an image or a font, the
result is still plain text: you can copy it, paste it into a Discord message, an Instagram bio or a TikTok
caption, and it will travel intact. Type below, pick how far you want the text to fall apart, and take
whichever version reads best on the platform you are posting to.
Type your text and choose a distortion level
Everything you type is converted live. The distortion level decides how many combining marks each
letter carries, and the three checkboxes decide where those marks go: above the letter, straight
through the middle, or below the baseline. Turn the middle marks off if you want something that still
reads cleanly in a username.
Distortion level
Marks
All four levels at once
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36 ready-made glitch styles
Each style below is a fixed recipe: a set of marks, a count and a placement. They are named so you can
come back to the one you liked instead of hunting for it again. Every block updates with whatever you
typed above, so you can scan all thirty-six versions of your own word and copy the one that fits.
The light styles stay legible; the heavy ones are meant to be unreadable on purpose.
Hairline Fracture
Copy
Static Hiss
Copy
Dead Pixel
Copy
Signal Bleed
Copy
Buried Alive
Copy
Rooftop Antenna
Copy
Cracked Screen
Copy
Rust Belt
Copy
Night Terror
Copy
Slow Corruption
Copy
Broadcast Ghost
Copy
Sunken Church
Copy
Ash Fall
Copy
Void Whisper
Copy
Barbed Wire
Copy
Hollow Crown
Copy
Crawlspace
Copy
Radio Silence
Copy
Wounded Signal
Copy
Cold Storage
Copy
Melting Point
Copy
Iron Lung
Copy
Grave Frost
Copy
Static Cathedral
Copy
Rotting Circuit
Copy
Bone Deep
Copy
Flatline
Copy
Screaming Static
Copy
Undertow
Copy
Feral Cursive
Copy
Cursed Ink
Copy
Broken Halo
Copy
Termite
Copy
Blackout Zone
Copy
Total Collapse
Copy
Whisper Network
Copy
Cursed alphabets: A–Z in 6 corrupted sets
Sometimes a full Zalgo stack is too much and you only want letters that look wrong. These six sets give
you the whole alphabet, one character at a time. The first three and the last use a single combining
mark each, so they are compact enough for a display name. The currency set and the upside-down set use
no combining marks at all — they are substituted letters borrowed from other Unicode blocks,
which means they survive in places that strip diacritics.
Click a letter to copy it, then build your word letter by letter. If you want the same idea applied to
whole sentences automatically, the fancy text generator
converts entire lines into other Unicode alphabets in one click.
Oblique strike — A̸B̸C̸
Combining long solidus overlay (U+0338) — a diagonal slash driven through every letter.
Double strike — A̶B̶C̶
Combining long stroke overlay (U+0336) — the classic struck-out cursed alphabet.
Combining underline — A̲B̲C̲
Combining low line (U+0332) — an unbroken underline that survives copy and paste.
Currency and look-alike glyphs — ₳฿₵
Real letters from other Unicode blocks that read as corrupted capitals — no combining marks at all.
Upside down — ∀ᗺƆ
Rotated look-alikes. Reverse the order of the letters yourself to read the word backwards.
Tilde strike — A̴B̴C̴
Combining tilde overlay (U+0334) — a wave through the middle of each letter.
How Zalgo actually works
Unicode reserves a block called Combining Diacritical Marks, running from U+0300 to U+036F.
A character in that block has no width of its own. It is not placed next to the letter before it — it
is drawn on that letter, and the browser keeps stacking as many of them as you give it. That is the
whole trick behind Zalgo: take the word glitch, append forty combining marks
to its six letters, and you get a shape that spills across three lines while remaining six letters long as far
as any text field is concerned.
The block splits into three rough classes, and they behave differently. Marks above (U+0300–U+0315 and
U+033D onwards) grow upwards from the top of the letter: acutes, grave accents, rings, dots, tiny superscript
letters. Marks in the middle (U+0334–U+0338) are overlays — a tilde, a long stroke, a diagonal
solidus drawn straight through the glyph. Marks below (U+0316–U+0333 and U+0339 onwards) hang under the
baseline: cedillas, dots, hooks, underlines. Each class stacks independently, which is why turning the middle
marks off leaves a shape that is still readable while the top and bottom fringe stays.
Nothing is rendered as an image and no font is installed. The output is plain text, so it survives copy and
paste, it can be typed into any input field, and it counts against character limits — one combining mark
is one character. A word of six letters at maximum distortion can easily cost ninety characters, which is why
a heavy Zalgo line will not fit in a 150-character Instagram bio. If your line looks empty rather than
corrupted, you probably wanted an invisible character instead.
Ready-made cursed usernames and bio lines
Thirty short lines already glitched at a light or medium level, which is the range that survives on most
platforms. Use them as they are for a display name, or as the first line of a bio. They are deliberately
short: the fewer letters you corrupt, the more of the effect survives truncation.
Where glitch text breaks: Discord, Instagram, Roblox, TikTok
Every platform handles combining marks differently, and most of them handle it badly on purpose. Discord
clips the vertical overflow of a message so a tall Zalgo stack cannot cover the messages above it, and it
silently drops stacks past a certain depth; three to five marks per letter is the sweet spot there. Instagram
keeps marks in bios and captions but its bio preview truncates aggressively, and the @handle
field accepts nothing outside letters, digits, dots and underscores. Roblox is the strictest of the four:
display names and chat both run through a whitelist, so combining marks are stripped or the name is simply
rejected. TikTok keeps marks in the bio and in captions, renders them clipped to a single line height in
comments, and refuses them in the username.
The practical rule is to write two versions of anything you post: a light one for name fields, and a heavier
one for the body of a message where clipping is only cosmetic. If a field rejects your text outright, switch
to the substituted-letter sets above — currency glyphs and upside-down letters are normal characters,
not marks, so a filter that strips diacritics leaves them alone. For Discord specifically, combining marks and
markdown do not interfere with each other, so you can still wrap glitch text in the syntax covered on our
Discord text formatting page.
Platform
What is kept
What is cut
Discord
Messages, nicknames and server names keep 3–5 marks per letter
Vertical overflow clipped to the message row; very deep stacks dropped
Instagram
Bio, captions, comments and the display name keep every mark
Bio preview truncates; the @handle rejects marks entirely
Roblox
Nothing — use the currency or upside-down sets instead
Display names and chat filter combining marks out or reject the entry
TikTok
Bio, captions and the nickname keep light and medium stacks
Comments render clipped to one line; the username field refuses marks
X / Twitter
Posts and display names keep marks and render them tall
Each mark counts towards the character limit; @handle refuses them
YouTube
Video titles, descriptions and channel names keep marks
Titles are clipped to one line in search and on cards
Platform behaviour changes without notice; test a light version first.
Glitch, cursed or Zalgo: the difference
The three words are used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Zalgo is the
narrowest and the oldest: it means specifically the stacking of combining diacritical marks, named after an
internet horror meme from 2004. Glitch text is the same technique described by what it looks
like — a rendering error, a corrupted file, a broken screen — and in practice the two words point
at identical output.
Cursed text is the broad category and covers both, plus everything that merely looks wrong:
struck-out letters, upside-down words, currency glyphs standing in for capitals, mixed scripts. That matters
practically, not just semantically. Cursed text made of substituted letters stays readable and survives
filters; Zalgo made of combining marks does neither. When a platform rejects your name, you do not need less
Zalgo — you need a different technique. Scary text, creepy text, corrupted text and distorted text are
marketing labels for the same two mechanisms, and both of them are on this page. For decoration that frames
text instead of destroying it, use the text decorator.
Clean glitch text: remove the combining marks
The reverse tool. Paste a corrupted message here and every combining mark is stripped out, leaving the base
letters exactly as they were typed. This is the only reliable way to read a Zalgo message someone sent you,
and it is also useful before pasting text into a form that would reject the marks. Substituted letters —
the currency and upside-down sets — are real characters, not marks, so they are left untouched by design.
Paste anything — the cleaner runs as you type.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Zalgo text?
▾
Zalgo text stacks Unicode combining diacritical marks (U+0300 to U+036F) onto ordinary letters. Each mark attaches to the character before it, so a single letter can carry dozens of marks that spill above and below the line. Nothing is drawn — it is still plain text.
Is glitch text the same as cursed text?
▾
They overlap. Glitch and Zalgo text mean letters buried under combining marks. Cursed text is broader: it also covers substituted look-alike letters such as ₲Ⱡł₮₵Ⱨ or struck-out letters, which stay readable.
Why does my glitch text get cut off on Discord?
▾
Discord clips the vertical overflow of combining marks so a message cannot cover the ones above it, and it drops very long stacks. Three to five marks per letter survive intact — use a lower distortion level.
Does glitch text work in usernames?
▾
Discord and Instagram accept it in display names. Roblox, Fortnite and most in-game name fields reject combining marks outright, so use the substituted-letter sets instead.
How do I remove Zalgo marks from text?
▾
Paste it into the cleaner on this page. It strips every character in the combining diacritical range and leaves the base letters, which is the only reliable way to recover the original message.
Why do screen readers struggle with glitch text?
▾
Every combining mark is announced as a separate character, so one glitched word can take a minute to read out. Never use it for anything that has to be understood.
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