Glitch Text Generator

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the Your text box.
2. Pick a style: Mini glitch, Glitch, Zalgo, Cursed or Maximum. Each one sets the intensity and directions for you.
3. Fine-tune with the Intensity slider and the Above, Through and Below checkboxes. Press Shuffle for a different random pattern.
4. Check the counter under the result, then press Copy text. The All styles at once list has a Copy button for every preset.

What glitch text is made of

Glitch text is normal letters with extra characters attached to them. Those extra characters are Unicode combining marks. A combining mark has no width of its own. It draws on top of the letter before it, which is how an e followed by U+0301 becomes é. Glitch text uses the same trick with dozens of marks per letter, so the line looks like it is melting.

The result is still text. You can select it, copy it and paste it, and no image or special font is involved. The idea is old: the look became known as Zalgo text after a 2004 forum meme, and people now also call it cursed, creepy or corrupted text.

This page is the main tool. The variant pages (zalgo text generator, cursed text generator, creepy text generator, scary text generator, weird text generator and corrupted text generator) use the same engine with a different starting preset.

How the generator builds your text

For every letter you type, the tool appends random combining marks from three groups. The groups come from the Combining Diacritical Marks block, which runs from U+0300 to U+036F and holds 112 characters.

• Above: marks that sit over the letter, such as U+0300, U+0301 and the tiny letters U+0363 to U+036F.
• Through: five overlay marks from U+0334 to U+0338. They draw lines across the letter, like a tilde or a slash through the middle.
• Below: marks under the letter, such as U+0316 to U+0319 and U+0323.

The Intensity slider (0 to 100) sets how many marks each letter gets. At 100, a letter can collect up to 14 marks above and up to 14 below, plus up to 3 through it. At 25 it is at most 4 above and 4 below. Spaces and line breaks get no marks. A hard cap of 40 marks per letter keeps the output from growing out of control.

Shuffle changes the random seed. The pattern stays the same while you edit, so typing a new letter at the end never rewrites the letters before it.

The five presets

The names are only shortcuts for slider positions. Pick one, then adjust.

The "All styles at once" list under the result shows your text in each preset, so you can compare before you copy.

A worked example

Type Hello, choose Maximum with all three directions on, and press Shuffle until you like the pattern. With one random seed, that five-letter word came out as 122 characters, of which 118 were combining marks. The counter under the result shows exactly this: total characters and how many of them are marks.

That number is why length matters. A 20-letter name at Maximum can run past 400 characters. A username field that allows 32 characters will reject it, even though it looks short on screen. Mini glitch on the same name adds 40 marks at most.

Where glitch text works

It pastes into most places that accept Unicode text: chat apps, social media bios, captions, usernames in some games, and document titles. In practice the limits come from the app, not the text.

• Some apps cap the characters per field. Heavy glitch text eats that budget fast.
• Some apps clip the line height, so marks above and below get cut off or overlap the next line.
• Some apps strip or normalize combining marks. You then see the plain letters, or only a few marks.

Combining characters have also been a source of crashes. Wikipedia notes that some versions of Apple's Messages app crashed when rendering such text and that Gmail has had problems too. Those bugs get patched, but it is a good reason to keep text short and moderate when you send it to other people.

Common mistakes

Making it unreadable

Maximum intensity on a long sentence is hard to read, and the marks overlap the lines above and below. For anything longer than a name, use Glitch or Mini glitch, or apply the effect to one word only.

Using it where people need to read it

Screen readers handle stacked marks poorly. They may announce each mark, skip them, or read the letters in a confusing way. The same goes for search: a name written in glitch text does not match a search for the plain name. Do not use it for contact details, links, headings or instructions.

Expecting a font

This is not a font and nothing changes the letter shapes. If you want letters that look bold, script or monospace, that is a different technique based on separate Unicode letters. The LinkedIn text formatter and the Discord text formatter cover formatting for those two platforms.

Forgetting the length limit

Each mark counts as a character in most counters. Check the counter in the tool and compare it with the limit of the field you are pasting into.

Undoing it

If you receive glitch text, or pasted too much, the Zalgo text remover strips the marks and gives you back readable letters. It can keep ordinary accents such as the one in café or remove every accent.

Glitch text is a visual effect, in the same family as other text tricks on this site. If you like encoded or unusual text, try the Wingdings translator, the Morse code translator or the binary code translator.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Zalgo text (origin, method, rendering problems)
• Wikipedia: Combining Diacritical Marks (block U+0300 to U+036F, 112 characters)
• Unicode chart: Combining Diacritical Marks

Checked October 2026. QuirkText is not affiliated with Apple, Google or any app named on this page.