Zalgo Text Generator

What is zalgo text?

Zalgo text is normal text with accent marks piled onto every letter until the word looks like it is melting or crawling out of its line. In its light form it looks like this: z͖͋̀à͚ͥl̖̋̀g͖ͬ͡ȍ̥̚ t̂ͧ͜êͧ͜x̰̥̚t̵̪̟. Add more marks and they climb over the line above and hang into the line below.

It is not a font and it is not an image. Each letter is followed by a string of Unicode combining marks, the same kind of character that puts the accent on é. Because the result is plain text, you can copy and paste zalgo text into most places that let you type. The same effect also goes by glitch text, cursed text, corrupted text and void text.

How to use the zalgo text generator

1. Type or paste your text into the box. It takes up to 1,000 characters.
2. For a quick result, use the three ready-made rows: Light Glitch, Glitch and Heavy Glitch. Tap a row, or its Copy button, to copy it.
3. For full control, use the Make it your own panel. Drag the How glitchy slider anywhere from 1 (subtle) to 20 (chaos). It starts at 6.
4. Tick or untick Above, Through and Below to choose where the marks go.
5. Tap Shuffle to keep your settings but re-roll which marks are used, then tap Copy next to “Your glitch text.”

The three ready-made rows always give the same result for the same text. Only the panel reacts to the slider, the checkboxes and Shuffle.

Light, medium and heavy zalgo

The ready-made styles differ only in how many marks follow each letter. Every mark is a character of its own, so heavier zalgo eats through a character limit much faster.

The examples sit in boxes that cut off anything too tall. Many apps display zalgo the same way.

Where does the name Zalgo come from?

Zalgo is an internet horror meme that began in 2004. It started with edited newspaper comic strips: familiar, cheerful panels altered so that the characters warp and stare in dread while something called Zalgo approaches. Zalgo itself is never clearly shown or explained.

The line that travels with the meme is “He comes.” As the meme spread, people began writing about Zalgo in text that looked corrupted too, with marks spilling off the letters, and the name moved from the monster to the writing style. That is why a search for “he comes zalgo” leads to text like this:

h̷̡͍̬͂͘ě́ͦ͛͐ͅ c̴͕̩͊̿͠ȍ̥̄ͩ̚͞m͇̼̱ͨ͒͝e̵͖̪͋̀͡s̸͙͎̭ͤ̓

How zalgo text works: combining marks

Unicode has two ways to write é. One is a single ready-made character. The other is a plain e followed by U+0301, the combining acute accent, which has no width of its own and attaches to the letter before it. The Combining Diacritical Marks block (U+0300–U+036F) holds 112 of these marks: accents, dots, tildes, rings, hooks and strokes used in real languages and in phonetic notation.

Unicode sets no limit on how many marks may follow one base letter. Zalgo text is built on that: a base letter, a handful of marks, then the next letter. The generator sorts the marks into three groups, one for each checkbox:

At a slider setting of 10, each letter gets between 5 and 10 marks above and the same range below. Through marks are used more sparingly: one per letter at settings 1 to 4, rising to between three and five at 20. The Through group also borrows one mark from outside the main block, U+0489, which rings the letter with small strokes.

Why zalgo text breaks out of its line

A text renderer places each combining mark relative to what is already there. The second mark above a letter goes on top of the first, the third on top of the second, and so on. Marks below stack downward the same way. The line usually does not grow taller to make room, because line height is set by the font and the app, not by the marks. So the pile is drawn outside the line and lands on whatever text sits above and below. That overlap is the whole effect.

The font matters as well. Some fonts stack marks neatly. Others put every mark in the same spot, so the same zalgo text looks tall on one device and flat on another.

Where zalgo text works, and where it gets cut off

A field that accepts Unicode text will usually accept zalgo, because to the app it is just letters followed by accent marks. What happens next varies:

• Shown in full. The marks spill over the neighboring lines. This is what a plain web page does by default.
• Clipped. The marks are still in the text, but the app only draws what fits inside the message or name box. Heavy zalgo then looks much milder than it did in the generator.
• Stripped or blocked. Some sites remove combining marks when you save, or reject names that contain them. Many chat communities also run moderation bots with an anti-zalgo filter that deletes such messages automatically.
• Not allowed in handles. Instagram, TikTok and X usernames only take plain letters, numbers, underscores and periods, and Discord usernames only lowercase letters, numbers, underscores and periods. Zalgo goes in the display name, bio, caption, post or Discord nickname instead.

Watch the length too. In heavy zalgo the five-letter word “zalgo” is 65 characters long, and a name field with a short limit will refuse it or cut it off partway.

How to remove zalgo from text

If someone sends you zalgo and you need the plain words back, there are two ways:

• Delete and retype. Quickest for a word or a name. Select the whole word before deleting, because backspace often removes one mark at a time rather than one letter.
• Strip the combining marks. For longer text, remove every character in the mark range. In JavaScript that is text.normalize("NFD").replace(/[̀-ͯ҉]/g, ""). It splits accented letters into letter plus mark, then deletes the marks.

The second method also removes real accents, so “café” becomes “cafe.” Check the result if the text is not in English.

Use zalgo sparingly

One zalgo word in a meme caption or a spooky title is fun. A chat full of heavy zalgo is not. It covers other people's messages and is hard to read, and moderators often treat it as spam. Keep it to a word or a short line, and stay with light or medium in shared spaces.

It is also unfriendly to screen readers, which may read the marks out one by one or skip the word entirely, and in-app search may not match a word that carries marks. Never put information people need inside zalgo.

Related tools

The Glitch Text Generator uses the same marks with a focus on readable names and titles, and the Cursed Text Generator mixes them with upside-down, mixed-case and spaced-out letters for spooky posts. For a single clean line through each letter, which is also a combining mark, use the Strikethrough Text Generator. The Weird Text Generator has more strange alphabets, and the Fancy Text Generator has every style in one place.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The generator runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you type is sent to a server. It is free and needs no sign-up.