Type your text
Enter a word or a short phrase. The output redraws on every keystroke. Spaces and line breaks are left clean on purpose.
Tool · glitch text
Type anything and stack Unicode combining marks above, through and below it, then copy the result. Nine styles, an intensity slider, separate up, middle and down controls, and a live preview on a chat background so you can see the string where it is actually going. This makes corrupted text you paste into a bio, a username or a chat message. A torn-RGB look on a photo or a video is a different job, and it lives in the Imagesmith studio.
The same string on a dark chat list, a light bubble thread and a fixed-height name row. Judge it here, not in the big box above. The big box gives the text triple line spacing, and nothing else will.
say something cursed
Fixed row height with overflow clipped, the way a feed, a member list or a name field does it. If the top and bottom get sliced off here, drop the intensity or switch Up and Down off.
Your text in all nine styles, each at the setting it was tuned for.
What it is
Glitch text is ordinary text with extra Unicode marks piled onto it. The letters themselves never change. An a is still the character a. It is just carrying accents it was never designed to carry, so the renderer draws all of them and the word appears to bleed out of its line.
There is no glitch font, no image, no special encoding and no filter. The output is plain text, which is why you can copy it into a bio, a display name or a chat message and have it survive the trip. It is also why it sometimes does not survive the trip. The section further down covers that without pretending otherwise.
The effect goes by several names. Zalgo text is the original one, from a 2004 internet horror meme in which overflowing, corrupted text meant something had gone badly wrong. Cursed text, corrupted text and creepy text are the same mechanism at different intensities. Glitch text is the catch-all, and in practice it usually means a lighter version tuned for a username or a bio rather than a wall of noise. The tool above covers the whole range, because the difference is quantity and direction, not kind. Cursed is about one mark per letter. Zalgo is a dozen. Void sends them downward. The rest sit in between.
One thing it is not: a picture. Search for “glitch” and half the results are a visual effect, torn color channels and scanlines on a photo or a video, which comes out as an image file. This page never renders anything. It hands you characters.
Unicode has two ways to write an accented letter. There is the precomposed character é, one code point, U+00E9. And there is the decomposed pair: e followed by U+0301 combining acute accent, two code points that a text renderer draws as a single visual unit.
Glitch text uses the second form. A combining mark has no advance width of its own. It does not occupy a cell. It attaches to the character before it and is painted over that character’s cell. Unicode places no limit on how many marks may attach to one base character, and most renderers do not impose one either. Attach twelve marks above an e and you get a tower of accents growing out of a single letter. The line below does not move, because the marks were never measured into the layout.
The marks that matter live mostly in one block, Combining Diacritical Marks, U+0300 to U+036F. They sort into three families by where the renderer puts them, and those families are the three toggles in the tool:
UP U+0300–U+0314, U+033D–U+0346, U+0363–U+036F
grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, ring, breve, dots,
and the superscript letters a to x
MIDDLE U+0315, U+031B, U+0334–U+0338, plus the double marks
strokes drawn through the glyph
DOWN U+0316–U+0333, U+0339–U+033C, U+0353–U+035A
cedilla, ogonek, rings, dots, lines and bridges
placed under the baseline
Intensity is how many marks are drawn from each enabled family per character, from a single one at the low end up to the ceiling of the current style. Each style sets its own ceiling, which is why Void can pour marks below the baseline and put nothing above it, and why Scratched piles strokes through the glyph and leaves the line box alone. There is also a floor: every character gets at least half of that ceiling, because a word that gives one letter eleven marks and the next letter none reads as a mistake. Within those bounds the marks are picked at random, so the same text and the same settings can produce a different arrangement. That is what Shuffle is for.
Two consequences follow from the zero-width rule. First, every mark is its own character. A twelve-letter word with ten marks per letter is around 130 characters to any counter, even though it still reads as one word, which is why heavy zalgo blows past bio and username limits. Second, the marks are allowed to overflow their line box. Nothing reflows to make room, so tall stacks paint over the line above and short ones paint into the line below. Some interfaces let that happen and some clip it. That difference is most of why the same string looks right in one app and decapitated in another.
The single-mark styles use the same principle with none of the randomness. Strikethrough appends U+0336, a long stroke. Underline appends U+0332, a low line. Overline appends U+0305. Because those are marks rather than formatting, the effect travels into fields that have no bold or underline button at all.
Enter a word or a short phrase. The output redraws on every keystroke. Spaces and line breaks are left clean on purpose.
Cursed stays readable. Corrupted is the middle. Zalgo is the full wall. Void drips down. Halo rises. Scratched stays inside the line. Each one arrives already tuned.
Slide the intensity for how many marks, and use Up, Middle and Down for where they sit. Watch the output count and the fit pills.
Judge it on the chat cards, not the big box. Copy it, paste it into the destination, and check it there. Phone apps and web clients often differ.
Support
This is the honest version. Support for combining marks is decided by each platform’s input sanitizer and each surface’s text renderer, both of which change without announcement. What follows is the shape of the problem, not a list of guarantees.
Usually the friendliest home, because message bodies often pass raw Unicode straight through. Tall stacks still get clipped by tight line heights, and some clients cap how many marks they will draw per character.
Send one test message to yourself and read it in the mobile app, not only the desktop client.
The usual disappointment. Bios have hard character limits and every mark counts, so a glitched phrase can eat a whole bio. Display-name fields are often more permissive than the username itself, which is frequently restricted to a narrow character set that rejects marks outright.
Keep the intensity low, switch off one direction, and watch the output counter rather than the input counter.
Many feed layouts clip overflow to keep rows aligned, so the marks above and below get sliced. The string is intact. The rendering is not, and no edit to the text can fix a clip.
If a feed clips it, drop Up and Down and lean on Middle, which stays inside the glyph.
Word processors, design tools and note apps mostly render combining marks correctly, because that is ordinary typography for them. Watch out for line spacing set to an exact point size, which clips the stacks the same way a feed does.
Set line spacing to a multiple before deciding it does not work.
Terminals assume one cell per character. Zero-width marks break that assumption, so the cursor, wrapping and selection can all go wrong even when the characters are stored correctly.
For a terminal banner, use the ASCII tool, which is plain characters in a grid.
The real cost. A screen reader announces the base letters and frequently the marks as well, so a glitched word can come out as a long run of accent names. Search, autocorrect and selection all behave oddly around it too.
Use glitch text as decoration on a short label only. Never put information a reader needs behind it.
Extreme is a demo setting. At full intensity a short phrase becomes a long run of characters and a solid column of ink, which reads as noise and gets clipped almost everywhere.
Start at Mild and walk the slider up until the word stops being readable, then come back one notch.
Up and Down are what push the text out of its own line. That is the point in a chat message, and it is exactly what a fixed-height bio or a feed row will slice off.
For a fixed row, keep Middle on and switch Up and Down off, or leave just Up on at a low intensity.
That box gives the text room so nothing collides, which is the most flattering condition the string will ever see. Real surfaces are tighter, and none of them can tell you what a different renderer will do.
Judge it on the three chat cards, which use realistic line heights and clip the last one on purpose. Then paste a two-word test into the real destination.
Glitch text defeats search, selection, translation and screen readers at once. As decoration on a name it is fine. As the words of an actual message it is hostile, and a lot of platforms treat heavy use of it as abuse of the field.
Keep a readable version of the words in the same message or profile, and glitch only the ornamental part.
They get searched for interchangeably, and they are not interchangeable. The output formats are completely different.
Glitch text, this page, keeps your letters and decorates them. One line in, one line out, still selectable. Good for a name, a label or a short phrase.
ASCII text art rebuilds each letter as a large shape drawn out of smaller characters, the banner style you see at the top of a README. It needs a monospaced destination and several lines of vertical room.
ASCII art from a scene throws a grid over a picture and prints a character for the brightness of every cell. On Imagesmith that idea is the ASCII AI animation tool: you describe the objects and the motion, a script draws the frames, and the result is a short black-and-white clip you can use as a background. Glitch text keeps the letters. ASCII art rebuilds them.
FAQ
You type normal words. The tool hangs extra Unicode accents on each letter, so the line looks like it is spilling upward and downward. The letters stay the same letters, and what you copy is still text, which is why a bio, a display name or a chat can accept it.
No. This page corrupts characters you can paste. A photo glitch pulls color channels apart, adds scanlines or shoves slices of the frame, and the result is an image or a clip. If that is the look you want, describe it in the Imagesmith studio.
Zalgo is glitch text turned all the way up. Marks from the combining block U+0300 to U+036F pile above, through and under every letter until neighboring lines get covered. The name comes from a 2004 horror meme that used overflowing text as a sign that something had broken.
A combining mark takes no horizontal space. It sticks to the previous character and is painted in that same cell. Nothing in Unicode stops you from attaching a dozen marks to one letter, so the accents stack into a tower. The stack is the effect.
Chat messages, many display names, comments and documents usually show the marks. It fails when a product flattens text on save, throws the marks away, draws only the first few, or crops the overflow. Web and app versions of the same product can disagree, so try a short string in the real field.
Each mark is a character of its own. Twelve letters with ten marks each land near 130 characters in a counter, even though you still see one word. That is how a heavy setting blows a bio limit. Drop the intensity or turn off a direction, and read the output count under the preview.
Only where the field allows it. Usernames are often limited to a small character set and will reject marks. Display names are looser. Even then, keep it light. A huge stack is hard to read, bad for screen readers, and some sites treat it as abuse of the field.
Usually, yes. A screen reader may speak every accent as well as the letters, so one word becomes a list of mark names. Search and selection get confused too. Decorate a short label. Do not hide a fact someone needs inside the glitch.
Same trick, different amounts. Glitch text is the light version people put on a bio. Zalgo is the heavy overflow. Cursed and corrupted are the names in the middle. All of them are ordinary characters plus combining marks.
Attach a mark instead of using a style button. U+0336 is a stroke through the letter. U+0332 is a line under it. The mark travels with the text into fields that have no bold or underline. The line-mark presets on this page add exactly one of those, with no random stack.
No. The script runs in the page. Typing, shuffling and copying never send the string anywhere.
Yes. The ASCII AI animation tool draws a scene out of characters and records a short clip. Glitch text leaves your letters in place and only decorates them.