How do I make strikethrough text on Instagram?

Instagram has no strikethrough button. Type your text at the top of this page, tap the Strikethrough card and paste the text in your bio, caption or comment.

How do I cross out text on Discord?

Put two tildes on each side, like ~~this~~. Discord shows the words crossed out after you send the message. You can also paste crossed out text from this page.

Why does the line look broken between letters?

The mark is drawn once for each letter. Short strike is narrower than most letters, so gaps show. Pick Strikethrough for a line that joins.

Why does my underline not show under spaces?

Skip spaces is on by default. Turn it off and the spaces get a mark too, so the underline runs under the whole line.

Do combining marks count toward character limits?

Yes, in most apps. Each mark is one more character, so crossed out text is twice as long as plain text. Every card shows its length, so you can check before you paste.

Is strikethrough text bad for accessibility?

It can be. Screen readers get each mark as its own character and may read it out or skip it. Use it for short decorative bits, and use the app's own formatting where there is one.

Strikethrough & Underline Text Generator

Type your text and pick a mark. Each letter gets a line through it, under it or around it, and you can paste it almost anywhere.

A big letter a with small marks stacked above, through and below it

Last checked November 1, 2026 by the TextEditor.com team

How to cross out or underline text anywhere

Instagram bios and TikTok captions have no button for crossed out or underlined text. This tool works around that. It does not add formatting. It puts a mark after each letter, and the mark draws the line.

TypeType or paste your text in the box at the top of this page.
Tap a cardTap the style you like. It is copied right away.
PasteOpen your app, for example your Instagram bio, and paste the text.

The line is part of the text, so it stays when someone copies your words again. In Notes on an iPhone you can also select text, tap the Aa button and pick strikethrough. That style only works inside Notes, though.

A bio with crossed out words

The crossed out and underlined words are plain text. Each letter is followed by one mark, so you can paste them into a bio like any other text.

What is a combining character?

Most characters take up their own space on the line. A combining character does not. It has no width of its own and draws on top of the character before it. Unicode calls these characters combining marks.

Type "a" and then U+0336, the combining long stroke overlay, and you see a̶. It is still two characters. Your app just draws them in the same place.

One letter plus one mark

aU+0061letter+◌̶U+0336stroke=a̶2 charsresult

aU+0061letter+◌̲U+0332low line=a̲2 charsresult

The dotted circle ◌ only shows where the mark goes. In real text the mark sits on the letter before it.

The main set is the Combining Diacritical Marks block, from U+0300 to U+036F. Its 112 marks include accents, lines, dots and tiny letters. You can see all of them in the official Unicode chart for the block. More marks live in other blocks:

Combining Diacritical Marks Extended, U+1AB0 to U+1AFF
Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, U+1DC0 to U+1DFF
Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, U+20D0 to U+20FF, with the keycap square used by Square bubbles
Combining Half Marks, U+FE20 to U+FE2F

Mark stacker

Letter

Above

Through

Below

U+0061 letter a

Tap a mark to add it. Marks of the same kind pile up away from the letter, so a third mark above sits on top of the second one.

Small raised letters are a different trick. They are full characters, not marks, as the superscript generator shows. For more marks and ornaments to copy one by one, open the list of mark characters.

Strikethrough, underline and slash: which mark is which?

Six marks do most of the work. Here they are with the codes you need for code or HTML.

Looks like	Mark	Code point	JavaScript	HTML
t̵e̵x̵t̵	Short stroke overlayA short line through the middle	U+0335	\u0335	̵
t̶e̶x̶t̶	Long stroke overlayA line through the middle that joins up	U+0336	\u0336	̶
t̲e̲x̲t̲	Low lineA single underline	U+0332	\u0332	̲
t̳e̳x̳t̳	Double low lineA double underline	U+0333	\u0333	̳
t̷e̷x̷t̷	Short solidus overlayA short slash inside the letter	U+0337	\u0337	̷
t̸e̸x̸t̸	Long solidus overlayA long slash across the letter	U+0338	\u0338	̸

The long stroke is as wide as the letter, so the strokes touch and join into one line. The short stroke is narrower, so many fonts show small gaps. Low line and double low line work the same way for underlines. A solidus is a slash. The short one stays inside the letter and the long one crosses all of it.

The long slash has a real job too. The not equal sign ≠ (U+2260) is stored in Unicode as = followed by U+0338. To put brackets around each letter instead of a mark, try the character wrapper. To add a symbol between the letters, use insert between characters.

Zalgo text: marks piled high

Zalgo text puts many marks on each letter, above, through and below. It looks glitchy or creepy. The Zalgo card in the tool makes it with three sliders, and Glitch, Crumbling and Matrix are ready made mixes.

Marks above and below a letter don't make the line taller, so a tall pile runs into the lines around it. Unicode's report on normalization, UAX #15, describes a "stream safe" format with no more than 30 marks in a row. Some apps cut longer chains or remove the marks completely.

Ten more Zalgo styles, a check against the limits of X, Instagram and Discord, a Zalgo inspector and a remover are on the Zalgo text generator.

Where does it work?

Most apps that take normal text also take combining marks, because many languages need them for accents. How the marks look depends on the app and its font. Here is what can go wrong.

What you see	Why	What to try
Gaps in the line	The mark is narrower than the letter.	Use Strikethrough instead of Short strike.
The line sits too high or too low	The app's font places the mark in its own way.	Try Underline or a different style.
Marks are gone after posting	The app removes combining marks or limits how many you can use.	Use fewer marks, or the app's own formatting.
Zalgo is cut off	The text box hides what is above and below the line.	Lower the Above and Below sliders.
Empty boxes	The font has no drawing for that mark.	Pick a style from the first row. Those marks are the most common.

Before you write a long post, paste a test line where you want to use it.

Style	Test line	Copy
Strikethrough	T̶e̶s̶t̶ l̶i̶n̶e̶
Underline	T̲e̲s̲t̲ l̲i̲n̲e̲
Double underline	T̳e̳s̳t̳ l̳i̳n̳e̳
Zalgo	T̴̞͉͛ͫe̅͊҉̣̩̭sͮͩ҉̢̳̠t̵̥̺͚͌ͪͯ l̓̀҉̻̙̜i̴̭̮̤ͦ̂n̴̺̞̎̽ͩe̷̠͈̲͛͒̽

You can also mix marks with bold or script letters. Pick a Letter style in the tool, or open the font converter for many more styles. To put a border around the result, try the text frames. For symbols like ꧁༺ ༻꧂ around marked text, try text decorations.

Native formatting first: Discord, WhatsApp and Slack

If an app has its own strikethrough, use it. The text stays plain, search finds the words, and screen readers read them as normal words.

App	Strikethrough	Underline
Discord	~~text~~	__text__
WhatsApp	~text~	None, use the Underline card
Slack	~text~	None, use the Underline card
YouTube comments	-text-	None, use the Underline card
Reddit and GitHub	~~text~~	None, use the Underline card

Put the symbols right next to the words, with no space in between. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook posts have no such markup, so the marks from this page are the way to go there.

How screen readers read modified text

A screen reader gets the characters, not the picture. In s̶a̶l̶e̶ it finds eight characters: four letters and four marks. Some screen readers read each mark by name. Others skip the marks or spell the word letter by letter. It depends on the reader and its settings.

What a screen reader gets

You see	The text holds	Length
sale	sale	4 characters
s̶a̶l̶e̶	slong stroke overlayalong stroke overlayllong stroke overlayelong stroke overlay	8 characters

The gray pieces are the marks. A reader that names them says "long stroke overlay" four times in one word.

Use marks for short decorative bits, like a crossed out old price next to the new one. Keep key information in plain text, and avoid Zalgo in names that people need to read.

How to remove strikethrough and other marks from text

Paste the text in the box at the top and press Remove marks. Or use the cleaner below.

The cleaner removes every mark. A letter with just one accent keeps it when Unicode has one character for the pair, so é stays é. A letter with a pile of marks loses all of them, and so does a letter with no ready made accented form, like n with two dots. To keep a few marks on each letter of Zalgo text, use the remover on the Zalgo page.

Clean up marked text

Paste text with marks

Cleaned

Hello there Café