Glitch Text Generator

This glitch text generator turns plain typing into Zalgo-style cursed text, such as I̺͊̈́ẗ̙̞́ s̟̹̃e̟͙̅ͯ̐e̲̣̠ͣs̘͖̿ ẙ̳͔o̝͒̌̉u̠̥̐, in light, medium or heavy strength. Copy it into a Discord name, TikTok caption or meme. The same text always gives the same glitch, and nothing leaves your browser.

How to use the glitch text generator

1. Type or paste your text in the box at the top. The result updates as you type.
2. Pick a strength: light stays readable, medium suits memes, and heavy (cursed) looks fully broken.
3. Tap Copy on the row you like and paste it into your message, caption or display name.

Worked example: a light glitch for a Discord nickname

Typing It sees you gives I̺͊̈́ẗ̙̞́ s̟̹̃e̟͙̅ͯ̐e̲̣̠ͣs̘͖̿ ẙ̳͔o̝͒̌̉u̠̥̐ in light strength. Paste it into a Discord display name or server nickname, not the username; the gotcha is that Discord may clip the marks, and a different full stop or space gives a completely different pattern.

What the generator does to each letter

Glitch text is not a font and not a different alphabet. Every letter you type stays exactly the same letter. What changes is what comes after it: a run of combining marks, characters that have no width of their own and are drawn on top of whichever character precedes them.

Unicode keeps most of these in the Combining Diacritical Marks block, U+0300 to U+036F. That block exists for real accents: the grave in è is U+0300, the cedilla in ç is U+0327. Languages need one, sometimes two, per letter. Nothing in Unicode stops you adding twenty, and a font will try to draw every one, stacking each new mark further from the letter. That stacking is the whole effect.

The generator draws its marks from three groups, which is why the result spreads in every direction instead of just piling upwards:

The “through” marks are the same characters our strikethrough generator uses one at a time. A glitch letter is, in effect, a strikethrough, an underline and a stack of accents fighting over the same space.

Light, medium or cursed

The three styles differ only in how many marks each letter can receive. Here is the word Glitch at each strength, with its true length:

The character column is the number that matters most. Every mark counts as a character in length limits, so Hello world in cursed strength is 121 characters long, most of an Instagram bio (150) on its own. Even light strength makes a word four or five times longer. The character limits guide explains how each platform counts.

Heavy stops at 20 marks per letter, which keeps it inside a limit set by Unicode itself. The normalization standard (UAX #15) defines a “stream-safe” text format that allows at most 30 combining marks in a row; software that follows it inserts a break into longer runs, which can split a mark stack in two.

Same text, same glitch

Most glitch generators pick marks at random, so the output reshuffles on every keystroke and copying twice gives two different results. Ours uses your text as the seed: the marks are chosen by a calculation based on exactly what you typed, so It sees you produces the same pattern today, tomorrow and on any device.

That has practical uses:

• Your name stays consistent. Paste the same glitched display name into Discord, Steam and a game, and it matches everywhere.
• You can share it. The ⋯ menu’s share link reproduces the identical result for someone else.
• Small edits reshuffle everything. Adding a full stop or a space changes the seed, so Hello and Hello! glitch completely differently. If you like a result, copy it before you tweak the text.

Where glitch text gets cut down

How glitch text looks depends far more on the app you paste into than on the generator. Apps have to decide how tall a line is allowed to be, and they make different choices:

• Clipped. Many apps draw each line in a fixed-height box, so marks that rise or fall beyond it are simply cut off. You see a flat-topped band of noise instead of tall spikes.
• Overflowing. Others let marks spill freely over the lines above and below. That is the dramatic look people want in a meme, and the reason it annoys people in a group chat.
• Stripped. Some fields remove combining marks when you save. Instagram is reported to filter heavy combining marks in places, though it has not published which characters it removes. Test your exact text before relying on it.
• Rejected. Usernames and handles almost everywhere (Instagram, TikTok and Discord usernames, X handles) allow only plain letters, numbers and a few symbols, so glitch text is refused outright.

Display names, bios, comments and messages are the places where it usually works. Discord says display names “can be almost anything”, and glitched display names and server nicknames are a familiar sight there.

Before you post it

Glitch text is designed to look broken, and it costs the reader something. A few things worth knowing:

Screen readers struggle with it

Depending on the screen reader, a user may hear the plain word, hear every mark announced by name (“combining grave accent, combining tilde…”), or hear nothing useful. Light glitch often still reads as the underlying word; medium and heavy are effectively unreadable. Our fancy text accessibility guide goes into what each screen reader does. If information matters, write it in plain text and glitch only the decoration.

It is unsearchable in practice

Search boxes rarely ignore combining marks, so a glitched name may not show up when someone searches for it.

Moderation tools notice it

Heavy Zalgo is a classic spam pattern, and some servers and forums auto-delete it. Light strength rarely trips these filters.

One word beats a sentence

“I can’t sleep, something is ẇ͕r̝ͨ́͌o̫̗̎̏̎ṋ̻̀͊ͦg̘̘̳̑̌̑” lands better than a fully corrupted line, because the reader can still read the sentence and knows exactly where to look.

Making it creepier without more marks

Heavier is not always scarier. Some combinations that work well:

• Pair with a frame. The Frame menu applies to glitch styles too. The Gothic cross (✞ … ✞) or Moon (☾ … ☽) frames add a horror tone without adding noise.
• Glitch inside gothic text. For a cursed blackletter look, write a title in the Old English generator, then add one glitched word after it.
• Use lowercase. Capitals are tall, so marks above them collide with the line above sooner. Lowercase gives the marks more room and looks more deliberate.

Glitch text versus a glitch image

Zalgo is one kind of glitch. The other look people mean, letters sliced horizontally and shifted out of line like a damaged video frame, cannot be made from Unicode, because no combining mark can move part of a letter sideways. That effect needs a real font drawn to look broken.

If you want the sliced, offset look for a thumbnail, poster or story, the Lettering Image Maker has a Glitch font and a Horror font with dripping letters. Both download as PNG images, so they look identical everywhere and never get clipped or stripped. For a username, caption or chat message, where you need text rather than a picture, stay with the Zalgo styles above.

Where the name Zalgo comes from

“Zalgo” began as a mid-2000s internet horror meme built from edited comic strips, in which characters were gradually corrupted by an unseen presence. Text overloaded with combining marks became shorthand for that corruption, and the name stuck to the text effect long after the original comics faded. Today “Zalgo text”, “cursed text” and “glitch text” all describe the same thing: ordinary letters buried under stacked marks.

Kept short and light, a glitch text generator gives a name or caption a haunted look without making the message unreadable.