Glitch Text Generator (Zalgo, Cursed and Creepy Text)

The engine keeps three lists of combining marks and draws from all three for every letter. Which list a mark comes from decides where it lands. All of them come from Combining Diacritical Marks except one, U+0489 COMBINING CYRILLIC MILLIONS SIGN, which draws a ring of ticks around the letter and gives heavier glitch text its frayed look.

Order inside a stack follows the order of the characters. The first above mark sits closest to the letter and each later one is drawn a step higher; below marks grow downward the same way. Overlay marks such as the long stroke do not stack at all, they are drawn straight through the letter, so two of them on one letter look like a single thicker scratch.

Marks are picked at random from each list, so two letters in the same word almost never look alike. Spaces and line breaks get no marks, which keeps words separate and lets the text wrap normally.

The engine has three strengths, but the tool on this page uses one: the medium setting. There is no slider. For each letter it adds one to four marks from the above list, up to one from the through list, and one to four from the below list, so every visible character carries between two and nine marks.

To show what the other strengths would do, here is the same phrase run through all three settings in the engine, with the length counted in code points. The light and heavy rows are for comparison only.

"Zalgo" is the internet's name for exactly this effect: text buried under stacked diacritics. There is no separate zalgo character set. A zalgo generator, a glitch text generator and a "corrupted text" tool all do the same thing, and the only real differences between them are which marks they draw from and how many they stack.

That is why the output looks different from site to site. A tool that only uses above marks produces tall spikes; one that leans on overlays produces scratched-out letters. Ours mixes all three families, which gives the dripping look in both directions.

"Cursed text" usually means glitch text pushed to the point where the letters are hard to read. The medium setting here keeps the base letters visible, which is what most people want for a username or a caption: it looks broken, but people can still tell what it says.

If you need it heavier, paste the output back into the input box. The engine then adds marks after every character, including the marks that are already there, so the stack grows several times over: in our test "help me" went from 31 code points after one pass to 212 after two. Every pass adds length, and a name field with a limit counts each mark as a character.

Going the other way is just as easy. Glitch only the first letter of a word, or only one word in a phrase, and the rest stays readable. A glitch text generator gives you the whole line, but nothing stops you from copying part of it and typing the rest plainly.

Glitch marks attach to whatever character comes before them, so they combine with other styles on the site. Make the base text first in another tool, then paste it here.

Upside-down text with a light glitch reads as something going wrong in the background: "help me" flipped becomes ǝɯ dlǝɥ, and with marks added it becomes ǝ͇̈́ɯ̭̋ ḏ̀l͙͂ǝ̱ͨɥ̯̋. Glitch over capitals looks like a distorted warning sign: Z̟ͮ́Á̴͓͕͇L̝̟̹͇̔ͦ̀G̷̯̱̓Ọ̫ͭ́͋̓. Glitch on one word in an otherwise plain sentence draws the eye to that word without making the whole line unreadable.

Text layout reserves a fixed height for each line based on the font, not on how many marks a character carries. A stack of eight marks above a letter is taller than that space, so it is simply drawn over whatever sits above it: the previous line, a username, a button. Marks below do the same to the next line.

This is why heavy zalgo in a chat or comment section can cover other people's messages, and why some apps and communities limit or remove it. It is also an accessibility problem. A screen reader may announce every mark by its Unicode name or skip them, and behavior differs between readers, so a glitched message can be slow or confusing to listen to. W3C guidance asks that meaning not rely on visual presentation, so keep anything important in plain words.

Because glitch text is your original letters plus combining marks, cleaning it means deleting the marks and keeping the letters. The reliable way is two steps. First apply Unicode canonical decomposition (NFD), which splits any letter that merged with a mark into a plain letter plus that mark. Then remove every character in the Unicode Mark category: Mn for nonspacing marks, which covers U+0300–036F, and Me for enclosing marks such as U+0489.

In JavaScript and Python that looks like this:

The same two steps work in any language with a Unicode library, because NFD and the Mark category are defined by the Unicode Standard rather than by one programming language. What comes out is your plain words, with every space and punctuation mark where it was, ready to paste back into a name field or search box.

Removing every mark also removes accents that were meant to be there. Run on "café glitch" with zalgo added, the two lines above return "cafe glitch": the zalgo is gone, and so is the acute accent on the e. For English usernames that rarely matters. For text in French, Vietnamese or any language that relies on diacritics, it changes the words.

If you need to keep real accents, a gentler approach is to remove marks only when a letter carries more than one or two of them, or to clip the display as described above rather than editing the text. Skipping the decomposition step does not work well either: on our heavy sample, composing to NFC and then deleting U+0300–036F and U+0489 left "ít's glïtċhȉng", because some marks had merged with their letters into single precomposed characters that the deletion never sees.

For moderation, the safer rule is usually to limit marks rather than ban them: allow up to two combining marks per base letter, which covers ordinary accented writing, and drop the rest. That keeps names like Zoë and Đặng intact while flattening anything that would spill into other lines.