Glitch Text Generator

Glitch text is ordinary letters buried under stacks of combining marks. Type something above and pick an intensity: Light for a readable corrupted look, Cursed for heavy distortion, Chaos for the full effect that spills over the lines around it.

What is glitch text?

Glitch text takes a normal letter and piles extra marks on top of and beneath it until it looks corrupted. The base letters are untouched underneath, which is why you can still roughly read Light but not Chaos.

1. A̴̜͑͛ͅl̡̺̝͋̚ḛ̰ͫ͒͜x̼͕ͪͥ̀LightReadable. 6 characters per letter.
2. A̸̳̥̦͉͑̈̏͂̀ĺ̵̡̦̜͖̮̂ͨ̚e̵̷͖̝̻͉̓̆̑̆x͇͖͔̱̒̐͑͌͜͢CursedHeavy distortion. 11 characters per letter.
3. Â̴̧̞̻̰̜̖͔͔̙̔̓̀̿ͦ͐ͮ̕͝l̴̶̢͉̗̙͕͙͇̘̄ͧ̀͛̇̒̿̀͝ͅę̨̡̝̼̹̜͖͇͖̣ͨͥ͊͗ͬ͑ͤͧ͢ẍ̶̴̳͚͉̗͇̪̥͔̾ͥ̈ͯ̎̑̚͞͠ChaosFull zalgo. 21 characters per letter.

The names differ by community but the mechanism does not. Zalgo, cursed text, corrupted text, distorted text and glitchy text all describe this same stacking of marks.

How does glitch text work?

Unicode has a category of characters called combining marks, which exist so languages can add accents to letters. They occupy no width of their own and render on top of whatever character comes before them, which is how é can be written as e followed by a combining acute accent.

Nothing in the standard limits how many you can stack. Glitch text exploits that: instead of one accent, it attaches dozens, drawn from the Combining Diacritical Marks block at U+0300 to U+036F. The letters stay legible in the underlying text while the rendering falls apart.

Why does glitch text spill onto other lines?

Because combining marks have no height budget. A line of text reserves space based on the characters in it, and a combining mark reports zero width, so a stack of forty marks draws far above and below the line without the layout knowing it needs more room.

The result overlaps whatever is rendered nearby, which is the signature look and also the reason platforms dislike it. Heavier intensities can push text over messages above and below, making other people's posts hard to read.

How many characters does glitch text use?

Far more than it looks. Each visible letter becomes a base character plus its marks, and every one of those counts against a field's limit. The multipliers here are fixed, so the arithmetic is predictable.

So a four-letter name in Chaos is 84 characters, which is why pasting a glitched name into a username field usually fails. If you need it to fit somewhere tight, use Light and keep the word short.

What is Zalgo text?

Zalgo is the original name for this effect, and it comes from an internet horror character invented in the mid-2000s. Comic strips and image macros were edited so the dialogue degraded into stacked, corrupted lettering as the character appeared, usually alongside the phrase he comes.

The name stuck to the technique itself, so a zalgo text generator and a glitch text generator do the same thing. Cursed text is the newer name for the same output, generally used without the horror association.

Where does glitch text get stripped or blocked?

In more places than most generators admit. Platforms limit combining marks precisely because heavy stacking overlaps other content, so expect it to fail or come back flattened in a number of fields.

Name and username fields are the usual refusals, often because of the character count rather than the marks themselves. Some apps silently drop the marks and keep only the base letters, so your glitched text arrives as plain text with no error. Others cap the number of marks per character and render a reduced version.

Search ignores it entirely, and a glitched display name will not match a search for the plain word. Test anywhere it matters before relying on it.

Should you use glitch text?

For a profile flourish, a horror-themed post, a game or stream name, or a Halloween caption, it does something no other style does, and Light is readable enough to be practical.

Two things genuinely argue against overusing it. A screen reader announces every combining mark individually, so a glitched line can take a very long time to read aloud and conveys nothing useful — it is one of the least accessible things you can put in a text field. And because heavier intensities overlap surrounding content, using it in a shared space like a group chat degrades the page for everyone else, which is why several platforms restrict it.

Keep it to your own space, keep it short, and keep a plain version of anything that carries meaning. If you want a striking style without those costs, Fraktur and bold script read cleanly and paste anywhere.

Three intensities, one technique

Light stays readable, Cursed is heavily distorted, and Chaos is the full spilling-over-the-lines effect. All three are the same trick underneath: combining marks stacked on ordinary letters, which is why they copy and paste as plain text.

The practical limits are the character count and where it gets stripped. Work out how many letters fit before you paste, use Light where space is tight, and keep it out of anything that has to be read by a person using assistive technology. Scroll back up and try a word.