Strikethrough text generator

Strikethrough works completely differently from every alphabet style on this site, and understanding the difference tells you when to use it. Nothing gets substituted. Your letters stay exactly as you typed them, and an invisible zero-width character is inserted after each one. That character is a combining mark, and the renderer draws it on top of the letter that precedes it rather than giving it space of its own. The line you see is stitched together from dozens of individual overlay marks, one per character, which is why it sometimes has faint gaps at certain font sizes.

The main mark is Combining Long Stroke Overlay at U+0336. Its short cousin at U+0335 draws a stub that does not reach the edges of wide letters, which looks deliberate on narrow characters and patchy on m and w. Combining Long Solidus Overlay at U+0338 gives you a diagonal slash, and it has an unusual property: for a small set of base characters, applying it produces a single precomposed glyph rather than an overlay, which is how a not-equals sign is built. The tilde overlay at U+0334 draws a wave through the middle instead of a straight line.

Because the letters underneath are untouched, crossed-out text has one real advantage over every other style here: it is still searchable and still readable to software. Copy it into a search box and it matches, because the search engine sees your original word plus some invisible marks. That also makes it the only style you can stack freely on top of the others, which is why this page offers bold, gothic, outline and fullwidth versions. The alphabet is substituted first, then the line is drawn over the substituted glyphs.

The flip side is that stacking marks is where things go wrong on real devices. Some text fields normalise your input and reorder or drop combining characters. Some strip them for safety, because unlimited combining marks are how zalgo overflow attacks work. And if the base character is already an accented letter, you are asking the renderer to stack an overlay onto a glyph that already carries a diacritic, which some fonts handle gracefully and others do not.

One more thing worth knowing before you use this on a chat platform: many apps already support strikethrough natively through their own markup, usually tildes around the word. Where that exists, use it, because it produces real formatting that screen readers announce correctly and search handles properly. Unicode strikethrough is for the places with no formatting at all, such as profile fields, display names, spreadsheet cells and comment boxes.

Common questions

Why does the line have gaps in it?

Each overlay mark is drawn to the width of its own base character, so at certain sizes and in certain fonts the segments do not quite meet, particularly around spaces and narrow letters like i and l. It is a rendering artefact and it varies by device. The short stroke variant shows it more; the long stroke shows it least.

Can I strike through only part of a sentence?

Yes. The mark attaches per character, so run only the words you want crossed out through the generator and paste them back into your sentence. This is the one style here where partial application looks completely natural.

Why did the strikethrough disappear when I pasted it?

The receiving field stripped or normalised the combining marks. Platforms do this deliberately to block zalgo abuse, and some form validators reject non-spacing characters outright. If it vanishes in one field, it may still work in another on the same site.

Is strikethrough text bad for accessibility?

It is a mixed bag. The words themselves read out correctly because the letters are unchanged, which puts it ahead of the substituted alphabets. But the meaning of the crossing out is invisible to a screen reader user, so if the strike is doing semantic work (a price that no longer applies, a task now done) say so in words as well.

See also

• Bold text generator
• Zalgo and glitch text generator
• Discord fonts and nicknames