Upside-down text is a small bit of fun that works almost everywhere. Type your text above and it appears flipped, ready to copy and paste into a post, a chat or a bio. The magic is entirely in the characters, so no app settings or special fonts are needed.
How it works
Rotate a lowercase “e” half a turn and it looks like the character ǝ. Rotate a “b” and you get something like “q”. Unicode, the standard that lists all the characters computers can display, happens to contain lots of letters that look like flipped versions of the ordinary ones. This tool maps each letter, digit and common punctuation mark to its closest upside-down lookalike.
A second step finishes the effect. To read as truly rotated rather than just mirrored, the order of the characters must also be reversed: the first letter you typed ends up at the right-hand end. Together, the swap and the reversal make your sentence look as though you turned the screen upside down. Multi-line text is handled line by line.
The three results
Upside down is the full effect: flipped characters in reverse order.
Flipped only reverses the order but keeps normal letters, which is the same as plain reversing. It’s included as a comparison.
Mirrored lines flips each line and also reverses the order of the lines, which is how a multi-line message would look if you turned the whole page around.
Where people use it
Upside-down text is popular for playful social posts, usernames and bios, for hiding a joke or a spoiler that the reader has to rotate their head (or screen) to read, in chat messages and in puzzles or scavenger hunts. It also turns up in graphic design mock-ups and as a gimmick in posters and banners.
Things to know
Not every character has a perfect flip. Letters like o, s, x and z look much the same upside down, so they’re left alone. Some capital letters use the nearest available shape, which can look slightly different from a pure rotation. Characters without a flipped version, for example emoji or letters from other alphabets, are left as they are.
It’s stored as ordinary text. That means copy and paste works everywhere, but it also means search engines and screen readers see the unusual characters rather than the words you meant. Screen readers can read these characters as long names or skip them, which makes upside-down text hard to follow for people who rely on them. It’s fine for fun, but don’t use it for anything important.
Display varies. Newer devices show these characters cleanly. Older devices and some apps use a fallback font, so characters may look mismatched in size or show as empty boxes. If it matters, test on a second device.
Related tools for playing with text
Want decorative letters instead of flipped ones? The fancy text generator has more than twenty styles including bold, script and fraktur. Looking for plain backwards text? The text reverser reverses characters, words or lines without changing the letters. Need a line of icons to go with your message? Try the emoji repeater. And the case converter will change capitalisation before you flip.
If you’re just curious how this kind of Unicode trick works, our article how fancy text fonts work explains it in more detail.
Other flips and twists
Upside-down text turns letters over. For a left-to-right flip, as in a mirror, use the mirror text generator, and for plain backwards writing the text reverser. A sarcastic tone is better served by alternating case, and the glitch text generator goes the other way with chaos.