Zalgo Glitch Text Generator

What Zalgo text actually is

There is no special font involved and no image. Zalgo text is ordinary letters with a pile of Unicode combining marks attached to each one. Combining marks exist so writing systems can build accented characters: the acute in café and the tilde in mañana are both doing their intended job. Nothing in the standard says you may attach only one, so stacking twenty onto a single letter is valid text that renderers were never designed to lay out neatly. The marks spill above and below the line, over neighbouring words and sometimes out of the text box entirely. That runaway look is the whole effect, and it got its name from a long-running internet horror meme.

How the three sliders build each character

The generator walks through your text one character at a time. Spaces and line breaks are left untouched, which is why words stay separated and the result is still roughly readable. Every other character keeps its original letter and then has marks appended in three passes, drawn at random from three separate pools:

• Up pulls from about fifty marks that sit above the baseline: circumflexes, macrons, rings, breves and the superscript letter marks in the U+0363 to U+036F range. The slider runs 0 to 30 and starts at 6.
• Mid pulls from roughly two dozen marks that strike through or wrap the letter, including the overlays at U+0334 to U+0338 and the double-width ligature marks at U+035C to U+0362. It runs 0 to 15 and starts at 2. There is one oddity in the pool, the Cyrillic combining millions sign at U+0489, which renders as a halo of small crosses.
• Down pulls from around forty marks below the baseline: cedillas, dots, rings, macrons and the vertical line group from U+0316 to U+0333. It runs 0 to 30 and starts at 6.

Almost everything comes from the Combining Diacritical Marks block, U+0300 through U+036F. Marks are chosen with replacement, so the same one can land on a letter twice, and a fresh random draw runs every time you type a character or nudge a slider. That means the same sentence at the same settings will never look identical twice. Copy the version you like before touching anything else.

A worked example in numbers

Type Hi at the default settings of 6 up, 2 mid and 6 down. Each of the two letters gains 14 marks, so the output is 30 code points long even though it still reads as two letters. Press Max Chaos, which sets the sliders to 30, 15 and 30, and each letter gains 75 marks: the same two letter word becomes 152 code points. A ten word sentence of about fifty letters at those settings comes to roughly 3,800 code points. That number is the reason so many platforms choke on it.

Where it works and where it breaks

Discord renders Zalgo well in messages, which is why it turns up in Halloween server names and horror role-play channels. Twitch chat and channel titles usually hold up. Most desktop browsers render it correctly because the layout engine simply stacks every mark it is given. Problems start elsewhere. Many apps cap how many marks they draw per character, so past a certain intensity the extras are silently discarded and your careful maximum looks like a moderate setting. Some platforms normalise input, reordering marks and changing the arrangement. Others filter unusual sequences out of usernames and display names, so a bio or a post is a safer home than a handle. Character limits are the other trap: many services count each code point, so a short phrase at high intensity blows past a 280 character post limit while looking like five words.

One thing to avoid

Do not put Zalgo text anywhere it has to be read or understood by a machine or by someone using assistive technology. A screen reader will attempt to announce every combining mark, turning a two word heading into a minute of noise, and search engines will not match it against normal queries. Keep it to decoration, atmosphere and jokes, and keep a plain text version alongside it wherever the meaning matters. Using it to bury text that a moderation filter would otherwise catch is a good way to get an account actioned.

What people make with it

Creepypasta and horror fiction posts on Reddit and Tumblr, glitch-styled titles for a horror game stream, Halloween decorations for a Discord server, alternate reality game puzzles where corrupted text signals a broken transmission, glitch-art captions on TikTok, and handouts for a tabletop campaign where an eldritch entity speaks. A low setting, something like 2 up and 2 down, gives an unsettling wobble that still reads cleanly, which often lands better than full corruption.

When to use a different tool

For bold, italic, script or bubble letters that stay legible, use the Fancy Text Generator. Decorative borders, stars, arrows and box characters live in Aesthetic Symbols, and Japanese-style emoticons in Kaomoji. To find a specific emoji by name, try the Emoji Picker. If you need a blank-looking name or a spacer that survives a form that rejects empty fields, see Invisible Character. For a mirrored or upside down effect instead of a corrupted one, use Reverse Text, and for a handle idea to corrupt in the first place, the Gamertag Generator. To bake the effect into a picture, put your output through Add Text to Image.

FAQ

Why does the same text look different every time?

Each mark is picked at random from its pool, and a fresh draw happens on every keystroke and every slider move. Copy the output you like before changing anything, because regenerating will not reproduce it.

Why does it look tamer in some apps than in the preview?

Many apps and fonts limit how many combining marks they will render on one character and quietly drop the rest. Lower intensities display far more consistently across platforms than maximum settings do.

Can I use Zalgo text in a username?

Sometimes. Plenty of services strip or reject unusual Unicode in handles and display names, while accepting it happily in bios, posts and chat messages. Test it somewhere harmless before you rely on it.

Can it be turned back into normal text?

Not by this tool. The original letters are still in there because marks are only added, never substituted, so stripping every combining mark would recover the text, but it is faster to retype the original.

Is my text sent anywhere?

Everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded to a server. Use is free, with no signup and no limit on how much you glitch.