Glitch Text Generator (Zalgo Text)

Glitch text makes ordinary words look corrupted or haunted: a creepy username for a horror account, a Halloween caption, a game or Discord name, or one word in a bio that looks broken on purpose. Because it's made of ordinary Unicode characters rather than a font, it survives a copy and paste and shows up for everyone who reads it.

The catch is length. Every mark is a character of its own, so glitch text uses up limits fast. At Light a letter becomes 2–4 characters; at Heavy it becomes 12–21, so an 8-letter name turns into 96–168 characters, which can be more than Instagram's 150-character bio limit. Use Light for a name or bio and save Heavy for a single short word.

Unicode has combining marks: small accents that attach to the letter before them, used by languages such as Vietnamese. This tool picks from 99 of them, 49 that sit above a letter, 6 that strike through it and 44 that hang below, and stacks several on each letter. Glitch uses all three zones; Glitch rising, Glitch dripping, Glitch through use one each.

Marks go only on Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters and on digits, where fonts draw them properly. Emoji, spaces and other scripts are left as they are, because marks would break them. A few marks are left out on purpose: some that apps rewrite as other marks when they save text, and two strike-through lines many phones show as boxes.

The marks are chosen by a seeded generator, so the preview doesn't flicker as you type and Re-roll just moves to the next set. Screen readers read glitch text badly or not at all, and search won't match it to the plain word, so keep anything people need to read or find in plain text.