Zalgo Text
Corrupt text with stacked combining marks. Adjustable madness.
About Zalgo text
Zalgo text stacks combining diacritical marks on top of ordinary letters until they bleed above and below the line. The effect is purely typographic: the base letters are untouched, and each mark is a real Unicode character that attaches to the one before it. Because of that, the result still copies and pastes as text β it just looks possessed.
Use the three sliders to control how much builds up above, through and below each character. Reroll for a different random arrangement at the same intensity.
Where the name comes from
Zalgo began as a 2004 internet horror meme in which comic panels were re-captioned with corrupted, overflowing text to suggest something breaking through. The visual style outlived the meme, and "Zalgo text" is now the general name for glyph-stacking done with combining marks.
A word of warning: heavy Zalgo can be genuinely disruptive. Long strings of combining characters have historically slowed down or crashed text layout engines, and many chat platforms now filter or truncate them. Keep the intensity moderate if the text needs to survive being posted somewhere.
Frequently asked questions
What is Zalgo text?
It is normal text with many combining diacritical marks layered onto each character, making the letters spill above and below the line in a glitched, corrupted look. The underlying letters are unchanged.
Does Zalgo text still copy and paste properly?
Yes. The marks are ordinary Unicode characters, so the whole string copies as text. Some platforms strip or limit combining marks, in which case you will see a tidier version of the same text at the other end.
Why does Zalgo text get removed on some sites?
Because it can overflow its line and cover surrounding content, many platforms filter heavy combining-mark sequences. Discord, Twitter/X and several forums normalise or trim them for exactly that reason.
Can Zalgo text break a website?
Extreme amounts can cause slow rendering or layout glitches, and older software has been crashed by it. Modern browsers handle it far better than they used to, but very long stacks are still worth avoiding.