URL Slug Generator
Convert any text into a URL-safe slug (kebab-case) made only of lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens. Includes an optional simplified Japanese romanization mode for hiragana and katakana.
Conversion examples
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Hello World! | hello-world |
| café | cafe |
| ___multiple---spaces here___ | multiple-spaces-here |
| がっこう (Romanize Japanese (hiragana/katakana)) | gakkou |
Tips
- The generated slug only contains lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens, so it's safe to reuse directly in URL paths, filenames, and CSS class names.
- Kanji can't be romanized automatically and gets stripped out during conversion. If you're slugifying a Japanese heading, turn on "Romanize Japanese" first and adjust the result by hand afterward if needed.
- Kana used as particles, like は and へ, are romanized by their plain reading (ha/he) regardless of context, which is why こんにちは becomes "konnichiha" instead of "konnichiwa" — edit the output manually if that matters for your use case.
- Runs of symbols, spaces, and underscores collapse into a single hyphen, and any leading or trailing hyphens are removed automatically.
- Use the Copy button to grab the result straight to your clipboard for pasting into a CMS or spreadsheet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Side Note — Slugs and the kebab-case debate
The word "slug" comes from newspaper and publishing jargon, where it referred to a short identifying label attached to an article before it went to print. On the web, it came to mean a short, clean identifier derived from a human-readable string, like an article title, that can be safely used as part of a URL. Many content management systems, including WordPress, use "slug" as the literal field name in their admin screens, so it's a term many site owners have encountered firsthand.
There has long been a debate over whether URL slugs should use hyphens (kebab-case) or underscores (snake_case) as word separators. Google has publicly stated that hyphens are treated as word boundaries while underscores are treated as joining characters, meaning "my-blog-post" tends to be parsed as three separate words while "my_blog_post" tends to be parsed as one single word. That distinction is a big reason most SEO-conscious sites standardize on kebab-case.
Converting Japanese text into a URL meant for an English-speaking audience is harder than a simple character swap. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic scripts, so they can be mechanically romanized, but kanji characters often have multiple valid readings depending on context (today's "今日" can be read as "kyou" or "konnichi", for instance), so there's no way to pick the correct one without understanding the sentence. That's why this tool deliberately strips kanji instead of guessing at a romanization — a wrong guess is worse than an honest gap the user can fill in by hand.