Mirror text generator

Mirror writing flips text along a vertical axis, so the line reads correctly when you hold it up to a mirror. It is a different transformation from turning text upside down, which flips along a horizontal axis, and the two produce completely different-looking output even though both involve reversing the character order. Leonardo da Vinci famously wrote his notebooks this way, most likely because he was left-handed and it kept his hand out of the wet ink rather than for any secrecy.

Like the upside-down map, there is no mirrored alphabet in Unicode and one has to be assembled from lookalikes. The best-known source is Cyrillic, which supplies a reversed E as Э and a reversed N as И, both of which are ordinary letters in Russian doing entirely unrelated work. Latin Extended contributes a reversed open e, a turned s and a handful of others. Where nothing suitable exists, a letter is left as it is.

Mirror text has one property that upside-down text does not, and it is the thing that makes output look surprisingly clean: eleven capital letters are their own mirror image. A, H, I, M, O, T, U, V, W, X and Y are all symmetrical about a vertical axis, so they need no substitute at all and simply appear reversed in position. A word written entirely in those letters, like MAXIMUM, mirrors perfectly with no exotic characters involved. That is why mirrored text in capitals tends to look more convincing than mirrored lowercase, where almost every letter is asymmetric.

There is a second, entirely different way to reverse text that you should know about and probably avoid. Unicode includes bidirectional control characters, notably the Right-to-Left Override at U+202E, which tells the renderer to lay out everything after it in the opposite direction. It reverses the reading order without touching the glyphs, so the letters stay the right way round and only the sequence flips. It is also a well-known trick for disguising file extensions, which is why security-conscious platforms strip it, and why it is not what this generator uses.

Because mirrored strings mix Latin with Cyrillic and Greek characters, expect the same friction as with flipped text: username validators may reject them as mixed-script, autocorrect will fight you, and search will not find them. Mirrored text also cannot be selected and read easily, which makes it a poor choice for anything anyone needs to act on. Use it for a name, a caption, a puzzle or a bit of atmosphere, not for information.

Common questions

What is the difference between mirror text and upside down text?

Mirror flips left to right, so it reads correctly in a mirror and the letters keep their vertical orientation. Upside down rotates by 180 degrees, so the letters are inverted as well as reordered. Different substitution maps, different look.

Why are some letters unchanged?

Two reasons. Symmetrical capitals like A, H and O are already their own mirror image and need no substitute. Other letters simply have no mirrored lookalike anywhere in Unicode, so they pass through untouched.

Will this text read properly in an actual mirror?

Roughly, yes, for the letters that have true mirrored counterparts. The substitutes are lookalikes rather than exact reflections, so a real mirror will show you slightly imperfect letterforms. It is close enough to be legible and to be fun.

Is mirror text the same as the reversed text trick used in file names?

No. That uses a bidirectional override control character to change layout direction without changing the letters. This substitutes actual mirrored glyphs. The override approach gets stripped by many platforms and is associated with disguising file extensions, so it is best left alone.

See also

• Upside down text generator
• Zalgo and glitch text generator
• Gothic and Old English text generator