Zalgo Text Generator (Glitchy, Corrupted Text)
Turn any text into creepy, glitchy Zalgo text by stacking Unicode combining marks above, through, and below each character. Pick the intensity and placement, then copy the result straight into social media or Discord.
Quick reference: samples by intensity
| Intensity | Sample |
|---|---|
| Low | T̮͟o̫͢o̸̯̦l̄ͨ͢b̖ͨȅ͎̤͟a͟ͅs̸̯̦e̸̯̦ |
| Medium | T̷̠͂̏ͣ̚͡o̼͖̚̕o̗͇ͧ̅̔̀͑͢l̼̬ͭͪͫͧb̵̭̦͓̺ͩ̓ͭ͘a̡̛̲̯̦̯ͥ̓͌s̸̺͙̤̰ͨ͑e̦͍̽ͤ̇͝ |
| High | T̷̵̢̩̼͍̩̯̹̮̘̣͎͗ͫ͊ͦ̽̑ͤ͆̆o̷̧̙̻̗̗̮̹͆ͭ͆̊ͥ̐́o̷̧̙̻̗̗̮̹͆ͭ͆̊l̺̭̰̺̰̗̖͓̜̘b̢̠̩̹͔͎̠̤̗͔͒̃̅a̩̯̥̮͓̙̱̭͓̪s̶̵̖̮̦͓̮̰̺̭̳͕̩é̡̛̯͙̪̪͕̄ͬ̃̊ |
What is Zalgo text?
Zalgo text is a style of glitchy text that stacks multiple Unicode combining diacritical marks onto every character, making letters stretch upward, droop downward, or appear crossed out and corrupted. There's no special font or image trickery involved — it's built entirely from real Unicode characters, so the result is still plain text you can copy and paste anywhere like normal.
This generator adds a random number of three types of marks to each character in your text — ones that stretch upward, ones that hang downward, and ones that pile up through the middle of the letter — based on the intensity you choose. Because the marks are chosen randomly, hitting 'Generate new pattern' gives you a different glitchy look every time, even with the exact same text and settings, so you can keep rolling until you find a look you like.
How to use the Zalgo Text Generator
- Type or paste your text Enter the text you want to glitch out in the box on the left. It works with letters, numbers, punctuation, and non-English text alike.
- Choose an intensity level Pick Low, Medium, or High to control how many combining marks get stacked on each character. Higher intensity means harder-to-read, more dramatic-looking text.
- Pick where the marks go Toggle 'Above', 'Through', and 'Below' independently. Turning on only 'Below' gives a dripping effect, while enabling all three creates a fully chaotic, glitched-out look.
- Check the result and copy it Your converted text appears on the right. If you don't like the pattern, hit 'Generate new pattern' to reroll, then use the share buttons to copy it or post it directly to social media.
Tips for getting more out of it
- Combining High intensity with all three placements enabled gives you the most dramatic look, but it also adds a huge number of characters — enough that some social platforms' character limits may reject the post. Leave yourself some room.
- 'Generate new pattern' produces a fresh result every time you click it, even with identical input and settings. Feel free to reroll as many times as you like until you land on a pattern you love.
- Depending on the app or font, text with a lot of stacked combining marks can render incorrectly and show up as garbled or broken layout. It's worth pasting a test message into the destination app first to check how it actually looks there.
- Restricting placement to just 'Above' or just 'Below' keeps some of that glitchy vibe while leaving the underlying letters easier to read.
Where people use Zalgo text
Social media and Discord profiles
Zalgo text is a popular way to add a distinctive, corrupted look to Discord or X (formerly Twitter) display names and status messages. It also shows up a lot as a flashy gamer tag.
Horror and glitch-themed content
It's a natural fit for horror game commentary, creepypasta-style writing, and glitch-art design work — anywhere you want an unsettling atmosphere created with text alone.
Meme and copypasta culture
Zalgo text is a staple of internet memes and copypasta, where deliberately mangling ordinary text into something hard to read is part of the joke.
Learning how Unicode combining marks work
Watching combining marks physically stack onto a character is a hands-on way to understand how Unicode handles text decoration under the hood.
Zalgo text terminology
- Zalgo
- An internet slang term that traces back to a horror-themed meme character that emerged online around 2004. The idea of an unknowable force that 'corrupts' text gave its name to this style of stacking combining marks to make characters look broken and consumed.
- Combining Diacritical Marks
- A block of Unicode characters that never appear on their own — each one is designed to render attached to the character right before it. They're normally used for accents and tone marks, but this tool stacks large numbers of them to create the corrupted, glitchy look.
- Code point
- The unique number Unicode assigns to every character, usually written in hexadecimal like 'U+0300'. Combining diacritical marks are spread across several blocks centered around the U+0300 range.
- Glyph
- The actual visual shape a character takes when it's rendered on screen. When many combining marks are stacked together, how those glyphs overlap can vary quite a bit depending on the font or app doing the rendering.
Frequently asked questions
Side Note — the Zalgo character and its meme history
The name 'Zalgo' is generally traced back to a fictional horror entity that grew out of English-language forum culture on sites like 4chan and Something Awful around 2004. There was no single creator or official backstory — instead, an unsettling image of an unidentifiable, corrupting presence spread organically as different posters added their own fragments to the idea, the way memes often do.
To give that concept a visual form, people started burying text under piles of combining diacritical marks so the letters looked 'consumed' or corrupted, and the technique itself eventually picked up the name 'Zalgo text' (or 'zalgoifying' text). Technically, it works by exploiting a real feature of Unicode combining characters — they can be attached to a base character with no built-in limit on how many you stack. It's less a flaw in the Unicode standard itself and more a case of people finding a fun, unintended use for a design choice the standard never anticipated.
Because the same trick can be pushed to extremes, an excessively long chain of combining marks can, in theory, overload an app's or website's text rendering — sometimes referred to as a 'Zalgo attack.' That's why many platforms cap how many combining marks a single post can contain. This generator keeps things firmly in copy-paste territory, capping its intensity levels well within a practical range.
This kind of internet culture springing from an unexpected use of a character-encoding standard isn't unique to Zalgo text. Emoticons built from combined emoji, and fancy text made from Unicode's decorated alphanumeric blocks (our own fancy text generator relies on the same trick), are other examples of a fairly dry technical spec getting repurposed by internet creativity into something playful.