Zalgo text generator

Zalgo text, named after an internet horror meme, is ordinary text with a pile of combining diacritical marks attached to every letter. Combining marks are the characters that normally put an accent on a letter, like the acute accent in é. Unicode's Combining Diacritical Marks block (U+0300–U+036F) contains 112 of them: accents, tildes, rings, dots, hooks, strokes and slashes.

A combining mark has no width of its own; it attaches to the character before it. Unicode doesn't limit how many marks can follow one letter, so when the generator stacks five, ten or twenty on each letter, they tower above and below the line. The letter underneath is still a normal letter, which is why the text often stays faintly readable: h̴e̵l̶l̷o, h́̈è̆l̃l̊ȯ, h̖̗e̜ḷl̰o̤.

Setting	What changes
Light	a few marks per letter; spooky but readable
Medium	clearly glitched, still fits on most lines
Heavy	dense towers that spill into the lines above and below
Above	marks stack upward, like static on top of the word
Middle	strokes and slashes cut through the letters (overlay marks such as U+0335 and U+0338)
Below	marks hang under the baseline, a dripping look

Start light and step up only if you need more drama. For a display name or a title that people should still be able to read, light intensity with marks through the middle is usually the most legible combination.

The tool shows expected compatibility for Instagram, TikTok, Discord, Facebook and X. A works mark means the platform is expected to show the characters; may break means some devices may show empty boxes or the app may trim or flatten the effect. These are expectations from the characters' Unicode version and common fonts, not promises, because platforms change their filters.

Zalgo is the style most likely to meet resistance. Some sites strip extra combining marks, cap how many a letter may carry, or reject the text outright, because tall stacks overlap neighboring messages and can make a page hard to use. Heavy zalgo can also run past the edge of a chat bubble or a comment box. @usernames never accept it, and Facebook won't allow it in your profile name.

The character counter makes the cost visible: a five-letter word with heavy zalgo can count as dozens of characters or more, so it eats through limits such as the 150-character Instagram bio almost instantly.

Every mark you see is a separate character, and a screen reader may try to read each one: "h, combining tilde overlay, combining short stroke overlay..." A single glitched word can turn into a long stream of mark names, or the software may skip the line altogether. The How a screen reader may hear it toggle shows the Unicode names of the first characters so you can see the problem for yourself. Search can't match zalgo text either.

Keep it to a title, a single word or an image caption that also makes sense without it, and never put real information in it.

Good fits: a Halloween post, a horror game or creepypasta title, an ARG clue, a glitch-art caption, or a dramatic "error" in a short video's text.

Avoid: flooding chats or comment sections, burying other people's messages, or slipping past moderation. That is spam, it annoys readers, and many communities ban accounts for it.

Accents work differently here: since zalgo is already made of combining marks, an accented letter just gets more of them. Everything happens in your browser; your text isn't uploaded or stored.