In a word processor, underlining is one keypress. In a profile bio, a comment, a text message or a plain form field, there is no such thing. People still want to underline: to highlight a key phrase, mark a link-like word, or just add some variety to a heading. This tool gives you underlined text that you can paste into plain text fields.
Type your text. Six styles appear, each one a different kind of line: u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲.
The styles
Underline is a single line below the letters, which is what you probably expect. Double underline is two lines. Low line is a short mark just below each letter, more like a macron. Overline puts the line above the letters instead. Dotted underline and Wavy underline use a dot and a tilde below each letter and give a different feel.
They are made with Unicode combining characters, which attach to the letter before them and are drawn on top of it. Each character in your text gets one. Spaces are skipped, so the line breaks between words.
What to expect when you paste
Different apps position combining marks differently. The underline might overlap with descenders such as the tail of a g or y, it might look a bit lower in one app than another, and the segments might touch or leave small gaps. A fixed-width font tends to look tidiest. Choose the style that looks best in the place you are going to use it.
Underlined text in this form should not be used where a reader may expect it to be a link. On the web, underlining means “click me”, and a reader who tries and fails to click is annoyed. Use it as emphasis in bios and posts, not for something that looks like navigation.
Limitations
Screen readers often fail to announce the marks, or read them out in a confusing way, so the underline is not likely to carry meaning for a blind reader. If you want a phrase to stand out for everyone, a simple structure, such as a capital letter, a dash or a line of its own, is more reliable. Search engines treat the text as a different string from the plain version, so a search for the plain word will not find it. If you want a reader to find a word, leave it plain.
To remove the underline later, run the text through remove special characters. For a cross-out effect, use the strikethrough text generator. Heavier emphasis is the job of the bold text generator, and the fancy text generator offers more than twenty styles. Our article on how fancy text works explains what happens under the surface.