Strikethrough Text Generator: c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶ i̶t̶ o̶u̶t̶ Anywhere

U+0336 is COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY, from Unicode's Combining Diacritical Marks block. Like an accent, it has no width of its own; the renderer draws it across whatever character came just before it. The generator inserts one after every letter, digit and symbol, so each character gets its own short line, and together they read as a single strike.

Spaces are left alone. That keeps words separate and lets the line break between words, but it also means the strike has small gaps where the spaces are: c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ o̶u̶t̶. Whether the segments join up neatly depends on the font, since each font positions the overlay a little differently.

The line sits at a fixed height in the font, usually around the middle of a lowercase letter. On capitals and tall letters like d or l it crosses lower down than you might expect, and on digits it can sit slightly off-center. That is normal for the combining mark and is one reason the struck text never looks quite as tidy as an editor's own strikethrough.

The tool gives you three related effects built the same way, each with a single mark:

Which one to pick is mostly about tone. A horizontal strike says "this is gone" or "this was wrong". A slash reads as "no" or "not this" and is a little louder. Underlines draw attention to text rather than cancelling it, so they suit a key word in a bio better than a correction.

The deciding question is whether the place you are typing has its own strikethrough. If it does, use it. If it does not, the Unicode mark is the only way to get a line through the text.

Here is what the platforms people ask about most actually offer, based on their own help pages where one exists.

For an app that is not in the table, there is a quick test. Type ~~test~~ into a draft and look at the preview. If the tildes vanish and a line appears, the app supports markdown strikethrough and you should use it. If the tildes stay visible, it does not, and the strikethrough text generator above is the way to cross something out there. Delete the draft afterwards so it does not post by accident.

Discord's own Markdown guide lists strikethrough as ~~Strikethrough~~: two tildes on each side. It also lists bold, italics, underline, headers, subtext, lists, code blocks, block quotes and spoilers. Type ~~sold out~~ in a message and Discord draws the line itself, keeps the letters as plain text, and lets you edit the message without fighting with invisible marks.

Using this strikethrough text generator in a Discord message works too, but it is the worse option there: the message is twice as long, it cannot be un-struck by removing two tildes, and anyone searching the server for "sold out" may not find it because the characters differ.

Names are the exception. Markdown does not apply to names, and Discord says display names may include special characters, spaces and emoji, while usernames are limited to lowercase a–z, 0–9, underscores and periods. So a struck-through display name only works with the Unicode version, and a username will not accept it at all.

In a word processor, the Unicode version is almost always the wrong choice. The editor's strikethrough is a formatting flag on normal letters, so spell check, find and replace, word count and copy-paste into another document all keep working. The combining mark breaks all of those, because every word now contains extra characters.

If Unicode strikethrough has already been pasted into a document, the editor treats it as text, not formatting: its strikethrough button will not remove the line, and the word count and spell check see every mark. Strip the marks first (the FAQ below shows how), then apply the editor's own formatting.

The one time the Unicode version helps in a document is when the text is headed somewhere else that has no formatting, such as a plain-text email or a form field. Strike it with the generator just before you paste it out.

If you are writing a list of edits for someone else to review, keep the document formatting and describe the change in words next to it, for example "removed: Monday". The struck word shows what changed and the note says it plainly, which survives any later copy into a chat or email.

Every character gets a mark, so the text doubles in length, minus the spaces. "crossed out" is 11 characters; c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ o̶u̶t̶ is 21. A bio or name field with a tight limit fills up twice as fast, so cross out a word or two rather than a whole sentence.

Search and matching suffer too. To software, s̶o̶l̶d̶ is not the word sold; it is s, a mark, o, a mark, and so on. Anyone searching for the plain word may not find it, and spell checkers will flag it.

Screen readers are the bigger problem. They may announce the mark by its name, combining long stroke overlay, after every letter, or skip it so the listener never learns the text was crossed out, and behavior differs between readers. Native formatting in a document or chat app can carry the meaning properly. W3C guidance is that information conveyed by presentation should also be available in text, so if the crossing-out matters (an old price, a cancelled date), say it in words as well: "was $40, now $25".

On the systems we measured, yes. On 2026-10-27 we checked U+0336, U+0338, U+0332 and U+0333 against the system fonts of macOS 26.5.1 and Android, and each is drawn by at least one font on both. Because your letters stay ordinary, the worst case on a device without the mark is plain, un-struck text, or a small box after each letter, rather than a line of missing characters.

We did not measure Windows. How neat the line looks still varies with the font the app uses: some draw it at a height that joins up cleanly across letters, others leave small gaps or sit the line slightly high. If it looks broken where you paste it, try the slashed style, which tends to hide those gaps because each slash is drawn separately anyway.

You can also stack styles. Make text bold or fullwidth on another page of this site, paste it into the box above, and each mark attaches to the styled character just as it would to a plain one. The combination doubles the length again only by the marks, since the styled letters are still one character each. Test the result where you plan to post it, because a font that has the bold letters but positions the overlay oddly can make the line drift.