Glitch Font Generator

There is no glitch typeface involved here. Unicode has several blocks of combining marks — the accents, hooks, rings and strokes used to write languages that need them. A combining mark has no width of its own: it is drawn onto the character before it. Nothing says you may only use one, so stacking forty of them on a single letter is legal text that renders as a tower.

The look is usually called zalgo, after a mid-2000s internet horror meme that spread on forums and image boards using text corrupted exactly this way. The meme faded; the technique and the name stayed. What the slider on this page changes is simply how many marks each letter is given, and the three directions are the three families it draws from: marks that sit above the line, marks that hang below it, and overlay marks that cross the letter itself. The third group is held to a mark or two whatever the slider says — an overlay sits on the letter rather than beside it, so piling them up only makes a blot — which is why the struck-through row barely changes as you slide.

Because the output is characters, every mark counts. A six-letter word at a high setting can be well over a hundred characters, which matters in a bio, a caption or anywhere with a limit. It also means the effect survives being copied, quoted and reshared, the way other Unicode letter tricks do.

Copy a row from here and every app receives an identical string. What each one does with it is not identical at all. The position of a mark is decided by the font in use, so a platform with its own typeface stacks the same marks at different heights and offsets. On top of that, many apps limit how much of this they will draw: some cap the number of combining marks per character, some clip anything that grows outside the line box, and some strip marks in fields that are parsed rather than stored — usernames and handles especially.

The practical answer is to test where you are pasting, and to use the direction rows for it. A rising stack collides with the message above it; a sinking one collides with the message below; the top-and-bottom row keeps the letters themselves clear, so the word stays readable at settings where the full row does not. If an app trims everything, drop to the one-mark rows at the bottom — the datamosh slash, the scanline and the block-noise frame all add nothing tall and survive nearly everywhere. That is also the safest choice for a Discord name or status line, where a tall stack is usually the thing that gets moderated.

Glitch text is hard to undo by hand. Each backspace deletes one mark, not one visible letter, so removing a heavy stack takes as many presses as there are marks. Paste the text into the box above and copy the Clean it up row instead — that is what an “unzalgo” tool does: strip every combining mark and keep the base letters.

Worth knowing before it goes anywhere public: a screen reader does not see a glitch, it sees a letter followed by twenty marks, and it either names each one or produces noise. Search does not match it either — a glitched word is a different string from the plain spelling, so nobody finds it and no hashtag collects it. Use it where it is the joke, not where the words have to do a job.