What Is Zalgo Text? How Glitch (Cursed) Text Works

Zalgo text (also called glitch or cursed text) is ordinary text with dozens of invisible "combining" characters stacked on each letter, so the marks pile up above and below the line like t̷̢h̴̛i̵̡s̶̨. No special font or image is involved. It is plain Unicode, which is why you can paste it into a chat, a username or a document and it keeps its creepy look. This guide explains how it works, why it spills over neighboring lines, where it causes trouble, and how to turn it back into normal text.

To try it, open the Glitch Text Generator: type a word, set the intensity and choose whether marks go up, through or down. To clean it up again, paste it into the Diacritic & Accent Remover.

How Zalgo text works

Unicode has two kinds of characters that matter here:

• Base characters, such as a, Z or 7, which take up space on the line.
• Combining marks, which take up no space of their own and are drawn on top of the character before them. They exist for real languages: the accent in é can be stored as a plain e followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT.

The main block of these marks, Combining Diacritical Marks, runs from U+0300 to U+036F and holds 112 characters: accents, tildes, rings, strokes, small letters and more. Each mark is designed to sit above, below or through its base letter.

Zalgo text abuses this design. Instead of one accent, a generator attaches 5, 10 or 30 random marks to every letter. The text renderer obediently stacks them, each one higher or lower than the last, until they climb out of the line and over the text above and below.

So a single visible "Z" in Zalgo text might actually be one base character plus twenty marks:

Up, middle and down marks

Generators usually sort the marks into three groups:

• Up marks sit above the letter, such as the acute accent (U+0301) or the small letter marks.
• Middle marks are drawn through the letter, such as the combining tilde overlay (U+0334) and the long stroke overlay (U+0336), the same mark that makes strikethrough text.
• Down marks hang below the letter, such as the cedilla (U+0327) and the dot below (U+0323).

Mostly up and down marks give the classic tall, dripping look. Adding middle marks makes the letters themselves look scratched out. In the Glitch Text Generator these are the Up, Middle and Down buttons, and the intensity slider sets the most marks per letter.

Why it is called Zalgo

The name comes from a mid-2000s internet horror meme in which comic strips were edited so that they slowly "corrupted" as a creature called Zalgo took over. Text smeared with stacked marks became the meme's visual signature, and the name stuck to the technique. "Glitch text", "corrupted text" and "cursed text" all mean the same thing.

Where Zalgo text causes problems

Because each letter carries many hidden characters, Zalgo text behaves differently from what it looks like:

• Character limits fill up fast. A 10-letter word with 20 marks per letter is 210 characters. Most limits count stored characters, not what you see, so a short-looking message can be rejected as too long. The Word Counter shows the real character count.
• Some sites strip or cap the marks. Platforms that have been flooded with Zalgo spam often limit how many combining marks a letter may carry, so pasted text can come out much tamer than it went in.
• It overlaps other text. Tall stacks draw over the lines above and below, which is the point in a meme but a nuisance in a comment thread.
• Screen readers struggle with it. Assistive software may read out the marks, skip them or stumble, so avoid Zalgo in usernames, headings or anything people need to read with a screen reader.
• Search and matching break. A search for "hello" usually will not match "h̷e̴l̵l̶o̷", because the stored characters are different.

Unicode itself suggests a sanity limit: Unicode Standard Annex #15 defines a "Stream-Safe Text Format" in which no more than 30 combining marks follow a base character. Software that follows it may break up longer runs.

How to remove Zalgo text

Removing it means deleting every combining mark and keeping the base letters.

1. Copy the glitchy text.
2. Paste it into the Diacritic & Accent Remover.
3. Copy the clean result.

This also removes real accents, so café becomes cafe. That is usually what you want for cleaning up Zalgo, but keep the original if the text contains words in languages that need their accents.

Developers can do the same in code: normalize the string to decomposed form (NFD), then remove characters in the combining-mark category. In JavaScript, text.normalize('NFD').replace(/\p{M}/gu, '') does it.

Other Unicode text effects

Zalgo is one of several tricks that use real Unicode characters instead of fonts:

• The Fancy Text Generator swaps letters for look-alike characters from mathematical alphabets, giving bold, script or double-struck styles.
• The Small Text Generator uses superscript and small-capital characters.
• Upside Down Text maps each letter to a character that looks like it flipped over.

All of them paste anywhere Unicode is accepted, and none of them are real fonts, so they share the same caveats about screen readers and search. If you want to understand the encoding underneath, our guide to UTF-8 and Unicode explains code points and why one visible character can be several stored ones.

Common questions

Is Zalgo text a virus or harmful? No. It is ordinary Unicode text. Very long stacks can slow down rendering in some apps, but they cannot run code or damage a device.

How do I type Zalgo text? You cannot easily type it on a keyboard, because each letter needs many combining marks. Use a generator such as the Glitch Text Generator and paste the result.

Why does Zalgo text look different on my phone? Each device draws combining marks with its own fonts and spacing rules, so the same text can stack taller, shorter or slightly differently from one app or system to another.

How many characters is Zalgo text? One base character plus every mark attached to it. A word that looks like 5 letters can easily be over 100 characters.

Can I turn Zalgo text back to normal? Yes. Paste it into the Diacritic & Accent Remover to strip all combining marks and keep the plain letters.