Zalgo Text Generator

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the box. The result updates as you type.
2. Leave the style on Zalgo, or pick another one. Use the Intensity slider and the Above, Through and Below boxes to tune it.
3. Press Shuffle for a different random arrangement of marks.
4. Check the character count under the result, then press Copy text.
5. Paste it into your post, name or message. If the app strips the marks, lower the intensity and try again.

What Zalgo text actually is

Zalgo text is ordinary text with a pile of invisible-width accents stuck to every letter. Your browser draws each accent above, through or below the letter it belongs to, and the stack climbs into the line above and sinks into the line below. That is the whole trick. There is no image, no special font and no hidden code. What you copy from the box above is plain Unicode.

The accents come from the Unicode block called Combining Diacritical Marks, code points U+0300 to U+036F. It holds 112 characters, originally meant for things like the grave accent on an è or the tilde on an ñ. A combining mark has no width of its own. It attaches to the character before it, and nothing in the standard says you may attach only one. Stack twelve and you get Zalgo.

Where the name comes from

Zalgo began as an internet joke in 2004. It spread on the Something Awful forums, where users posted edited comics and image macros with the word "Zalgo" scrawled across them, and a creepypasta grew up around an unnameable dark figure. The glitchy lettering that came with the joke ended up with the name too. Know Your Meme dates the first comics to July 2004. Wikipedia describes Zalgo text as text modified with excessive Unicode combining characters, and notes it is also called cursed text or glitch text.

Twenty years on, nobody needs the backstory to use it. People paste it into usernames, captions, group chat jokes and Halloween posts. This page opens on the classic setting, the one most people picture when they type "zalgo".

The default settings and why they look the way they do

The tool opens on the Zalgo style at intensity 55 with all three directions on: above, through and below. The sample text is "Zalgo is coming", and it renders as 171 characters. Fifteen visible characters become 171 because 156 of them are combining marks. Spaces are left alone, so the gaps between words stay clean.

Each direction draws from its own pool of marks. The generator has 51 marks that sit above, 5 that cut through the middle of a letter and 39 that sit below. At intensity 55 each letter gets between 2 and 8 marks above, between 2 and 8 below, and 1 or 2 through the middle. So a single letter carries somewhere between 5 and 18 extra characters. Letters are not equal, which is exactly why the result looks organic and not like a stamped pattern.

One word, five intensities

Take the word "night" with the default shuffle and all three directions on:

Five letters turn into 60 characters at the classic setting. Slide to 100 and the same five letters weigh 104 characters. Press Shuffle and the counts move a little, because the marks are drawn at random, but the ceiling stays the same.

How to get a result you actually like

Start with the preset and change one thing at a time. If the result swallows the line above it, untick Above. If it looks too clean, drag the slider up in steps of 10 rather than jumping to the top. If you only want a flicker of corruption, generate the phrase and then swap the words you want clean back to plain text before you paste.

• Short text wins. A single word or a short line reads as a design choice. A whole paragraph reads as noise.
• Capital letters take marks well because they are tall and the stack has room to breathe. Lowercase with descenders (g, y, p) collides with the marks below faster.
• Leave spaces. The tool skips them on purpose so word boundaries survive.
• Check the character counter under the result before you paste into a field with a limit.

Where it works and where it does not

Because the output is plain Unicode, it can be pasted anywhere that accepts text. Whether it shows up the way you see it here depends on the app. Some apps strip or limit combining marks, some clip the overflow so the stack gets cut off at the edge of a box, and some fonts draw marks in slightly different positions. Wikipedia also notes that certain older versions of Apple Messages crashed on Zalgo text, which is a good reason to test with yourself before sending heavy text to somebody else.

Reading it, searching it, undoing it

The base letters are still there, so a person can often read lightly stacked text. At high intensity the marks pile up, and the word is only recognizable from context. Text search treats the marks as separate characters, so a Zalgo version of a word usually will not match a search for the plain version.

If you have text that somebody else glitched, or you want your own back, use the Zalgo text remover. It strips stacked marks and has a mode that keeps real accents like the é in "café". If you want a gentler effect to start with, the main glitch text generator opens at a lower setting, weird text is the subtle version, and cursed text goes harder than this page.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Zalgo text
• Wikipedia: Zalgo
• Know Your Meme: Zalgo
• Wikipedia: Combining Diacritical Marks
• Unicode chart: Combining Diacritical Marks, U+0300 to U+036F

Checked October 2026.