Glitch text, often called zalgo text, looks like a screen error or a haunted message: letters with marks piled above, through and below them, as though the text itself is corrupting. It’s a favourite for horror posts, gaming handles, memes and anywhere that normal text feels too tidy. This generator makes it in one click.
How it works
Unicode includes a large set of combining marks: accents and small symbols that aren’t meant to stand alone but attach to the character before them, such as the accent on the é in “café”. There are marks that sit above a letter, marks that sit below, and marks that pass through the middle. Normal text uses one at a time. Glitch text uses many.
For each letter in your text, the generator adds a random handful of marks above, through and below it. Because marks stack, a letter with several of them above gets a tall tower; a letter with several below gets a long tail. The more marks, the more chaotic the result.
Controls
Glitch level sets how many marks each letter receives: Low adds one or two, Normal a few, High a lot and Extreme piles on enough that the line becomes hard to read. Start at Normal and adjust.
Marks above, through and below let you switch each direction on or off. Turning off “through” tends to look cleaner, and turning off “above” avoids overlapping the line of text above yours.
Randomize generates a fresh set. Because the marks are random, no two results are the same, so keep pressing until you find one you like.
The results show five variants: the full glitch, another random version, marks above only, marks below only, and a strikethrough variant. Each has its own copy button.
Where to use it
- Gaming names and bios, for handles that stand out.
- Spooky or horror posts, captions and story titles.
- Memes and jokes, where a “broken” look is the point.
- Creative writing and design mock-ups, for a cursed or digital-error effect.
Before you post it
Glitch text is fun but fragile, and a few cautions are worth knowing.
It can overflow. The marks reach well above and below the line. In an app with tight line height, they can overlap the text around them or be cut off at the edge of a box. If that happens, try the Low level or “marks below only”.
It may be filtered. Some platforms limit or strip combining marks, particularly in usernames, to stop text from spilling over other content. If your result looks plain after pasting, that’s the platform at work.
It’s hard to read, and harder for assistive tools. Screen readers either skip the marks or read them out as a stream of odd symbols. Don’t use glitch text for anything people need to read, such as instructions, prices or contact details. Keep it to short, decorative uses.
It’s hard to search. The marks make text unlike the plain words, so it won’t be found by people searching for the plain version.
Keep it kind. Cursed-looking text is a joke among friends, but flooding a chat with huge blocks of it can be disruptive. Most communities treat that as spam.
Related styles
Glitch text belongs to a family of Unicode text tricks. If you’d like decorative letters instead, the fancy text generator has bold, script, fraktur and more. For flipped text, there’s the upside down generator. Small text makes tiny raised and lowered letters, and big text makes giant block letters. To learn how these characters work and why they cause accessibility problems, read how fancy text fonts work and when to avoid them.
Marks you can strip afterwards
Glitch text is built from combining marks, and the same marks power the neater effects on the strikethrough and underline pages. If you want to clean a glitched string back to plain letters, remove special characters deletes the marks, and the text to Unicode converter shows exactly which ones were added to each letter.