Zalgo Glitch Text
Add or remove glitch combining marks.
Overview
Add or remove glitch-text effects using Unicode combining marks stacked above, below, and through each letter. The result — known as "Zalgo text" — looks distorted and crawling, popular in horror-themed posts, internet meme culture, and creepy aesthetic accounts. The reverse mode strips the marks and returns the underlying clean text.
Designers preparing horror-themed graphics, social media users posting Halloween content, ARG and creepypasta authors creating uncanny atmosphere, and meme creators all reach for it. The intensity is usually adjustable so you can go from "mildly glitchy" to "the text has consumed my entire screen".
How it works
Unicode includes a large repertoire of combining marks — characters that don't stand alone but attach to whatever character comes before. The combining diacritical marks block (U+0300–U+036F) alone contains 112 such characters. The tool inserts a random selection of these above, through, and below each letter of your input, controlled by an intensity slider that determines how many marks per letter to add.
The "remove Zalgo" mode walks the input and filters out anything classified as a combining mark, leaving only base characters.
Examples
Input: HELLO
Output: H̷̦̟̅̾Ḛ̴̛͐L̵̩̅͝L̶̢̊͂Ó̷͇ (mild)
Output: Ḩ͙͎̀͠ͅͅḚ̴̥̪̅̾͠͝L̸͖̟͝L̶̟͝Ŏ̵̩ (heavy)
Reverse: H̷̦̟̅̾Ḛ̴̛͐L̵̩̅͝L̶̢̊͂Ó̷͇
Output: HELLO
FAQ
Why does Zalgo text break some layouts?
Combining marks stack vertically without limit, so heavily-zalgoed text can climb out of its line box and overlap adjacent text. Some apps render it cleanly; others struggle.
Is it safe to post in chat?
Most platforms render it fine. A few accessibility-focused communities discourage it because screen readers and assistive tech can have trouble with the dense combining-mark sequences.
Why is it called "Zalgo"?
The name comes from a Dave Kelly internet horror comic where "Zalgo" is a malevolent supernatural entity whose presence corrupts text and images. The aesthetic became a 2000s-era meme.