Zalgo and glitch text generator

Zalgo text is built from combining diacritical marks, the characters that normally sit above or below a letter to make an accent. Unicode puts the main set in the range U+0300 to U+036F, and each one is defined as non-spacing: it takes up no width of its own and is drawn onto the character before it. Nothing in the standard limits how many you can attach to a single base letter. Stack thirty of them and the renderer dutifully tries to draw thirty, which is how a single letter grows a tower of hooks and dots that climbs into the line above.

The marks divide by where they attach, and a good generator draws from all three groups. Marks with combining class 230 go above, class 220 go below, and a smaller set of overlays sit through the middle of the glyph. Mixing the three is what gives zalgo its shredded, growing-in-every-direction look. Pulling only from the above group gives you something that looks more like a bad accent than a curse. The three intensity levels here differ in how many marks per character they pick and how they are distributed between the three positions.

The name comes from a 2004 internet in-joke, a creepypasta figure whose speech was rendered in corrupted text, and the aesthetic outlasted the joke completely. It now means glitch, corruption and horror as a general visual shorthand, which is why the light setting is popular with people who want a subtle broken-signal effect on an otherwise normal username rather than anything actually frightening.

Technically, zalgo is the most fragile thing you can paste into a text field, and that is by design on the receiving end. Because combining marks overflow their line box, they can cover interface elements above and below, so platforms defend themselves: some cap the number of marks per character, some strip non-spacing characters from names and titles entirely, some normalise the string in a way that reorders your marks and changes the look. Unicode normalisation does not remove them, but it does sort them by combining class, so a heavily stacked string can come out looking different after a round trip through a system that normalises.

Two courtesies worth observing. First, screen readers have a genuinely bad time with this: depending on the software, a zalgo word is announced as a stream of diacritic names, or as gibberish, or is skipped. It is close to unreadable for anyone using assistive technology, so keep it out of anything that carries information. Second, heavy zalgo in a shared space like a group chat or a Discord server is often against the rules, because it disrupts the layout for everyone in the channel. Plenty of servers run bots that automatically rename or remove it.

Common questions

What actually makes text look glitched?

Stacked combining diacritical marks. Each one is a zero-width character drawn on top of the letter before it, and because there is no limit on how many can attach, they pile up above, below and through the glyph until the text spills out of its line.

Why does my zalgo get cut off or look flat?

The container is clipping the overflow. Marks extend beyond the line box, and if the field has a fixed height or hides overflow, everything past the edge simply is not drawn. Lower the intensity and it will fit.

Why did a site strip my cursed text?

Deliberate filtering. Non-spacing marks are a known way to break layouts and to build confusable strings, so many platforms remove or limit them in usernames, titles and display names. Messages usually survive where names do not.

Can I make zalgo out of bold or gothic letters?

Yes, and both are offered above. The alphabet substitution runs first and the marks attach afterwards, so the diacritics land on the styled glyph. Wider glyphs like fullwidth actually hold heavy stacking better than narrow ones.

Is zalgo text harmful?

Not to your device. It is ordinary text and it cannot execute anything. It can make a page or an app scroll oddly and it can make a channel unpleasant to read, which is why it is moderated, but pasting it is not dangerous.

See also

• Strikethrough text generator
• Upside down text generator
• Discord fonts and nicknames