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

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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