Zalgo Text Generator - Creepy Glitchy Text

How to use this tool

1. Choose Corrupt to add marks or Clean to remove the documented Zalgo mark blocks.
2. Type or paste your text into the input.
3. In Corrupt mode, adjust intensity from 1 to 5 and turn Above, Middle, or Below marks on or off.
4. Copy the result and paste it where you need it.

What is Zalgo text?

Zalgo text creates a "glitching" or "corrupted" appearance by stacking Unicode combining diacritical marks above, below, and through characters. Combining diacritics (Unicode block U+0300–U+036F) are normally used for accents (like é = e + U+0301). Zalgo text stacks dozens of them on a single character.

In Corrupt mode, the intensity controls how many marks are added to each input character, and the Above, Middle, and Below switches let you disable any direction. Middle marks are available at every intensity; at levels 1 through 5, the tool adds max(1, floor(intensity / 2)) Middle marks per character when that direction is enabled. This can help when a chat clips tall marks above or below a line.

The Zalgo meme

The "Zalgo" aesthetic originated in internet horror (creepypasta) culture around 2004, associated with distorted, eldritch imagery. The name comes from a meme created by Dave Kelly. Zalgo text became a way to make writing visually "corrupted" as a stylistic choice.

Technical note

Each visible character in Zalgo text may consist of 20–100+ Unicode code points. This can cause rendering issues in older software and inflates character counts - a single Zalgo "character" may consume many bytes in UTF-8.

Unicode combining character blocks

Zalgo text draws from three Unicode blocks of combining characters:

• Combining Diacritical Marks (U+0300–U+036F): 112 characters. The core block used for accents in normal text (grave, acute, circumflex, etc.). Zalgo text stacks these in bulk to create the vertical overflow effect.
• Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (U+1DC0–U+1DFF): additional combining marks not covered by the base block. Used in phonetic and linguistic notation but also available for Zalgo stacking.
• Combining Half Marks (U+FE20–U+FE2F): ligature-related combining marks that span across character boundaries, contributing to the horizontal "bleeding" effect seen at higher Zalgo intensities.

Platform rendering differences

Zalgo text renders very differently across platforms - test before using it anywhere important:

• Discord: renders moderately well; clips combining marks at the line-height boundary rather than overflowing into adjacent lines.
• Twitter / X: clips vertical overflow at line height, so high-intensity Zalgo looks similar to medium-intensity on most displays.
• Terminal emulators: behaviour varies widely. Some terminals crash or freeze when rendering very long combining character sequences. Test in a safe environment before pasting into a terminal.
• PDF renderers: many PDF engines (including some versions of Adobe Reader) can corrupt text adjacent to high-density combining character sequences.

How to clean Zalgo text

To strip Zalgo combining characters from a string in JavaScript, use a regular expression targeting the three Unicode blocks:

      // Remove all Zalgo combining diacritical marks
const cleaned = zalgoString.replace(/[\u0300-\u036f\u1dc0-\u1dff\ufe20-\ufe2f]/g, '');
    

Clean mode applies this same three-block rule locally and leaves unrelated characters alone. Precomposed accented characters such as é and ñ remain intact, but decomposed accents whose combining mark falls in one of these ranges lose that mark. Removing visual marks is not a content-safety check and does not defeat moderation performed by a server.