Zalgo text generator

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

How to make Zalgo text

1. TypeType or paste your text in the box at the top of this page.
2. Pick a strengthChoose Light, Medium, Heavy or Chaos, or move the sliders.
3. Copy and pasteTap the result to copy it. Paste it in your post, bio or chat.

Above, Through and Below set the most marks one letter can get in each spot. Every letter gets a random number up to that limit, so no two letters look the same. Press New random mix for a fresh pick of marks.

Growing starts clean and gets wilder toward the end. Fading does the opposite. Leave some letters clean skips about one letter in three, so the text looks like it is breaking up.

Zalgo text examples to copy

Here are the classic Zalgo lines and a few that people often ask for, each in a different style.

Where the name Zalgo comes from

Zalgo started in comic strips, not in text. In 2004, an artist who posted as Shmorky on the Something Awful forums edited old Nancy and Archie strips into creepy ones. Two of them named a dark being called Zalgo.

Other forum users made their own edits of comics like Garfield, with characters bleeding from the eyes. Zalgo became a force that ruins everything it touches. The broken text came later, when people wrote Zalgo warnings in letters that seem to melt. The Wikipedia article on Zalgo text has more of the story.

That answer warns that parsing HTML with regular expressions will drive you mad. As it goes on, the letters fall apart until the text says "he comes". Programmers still share the original answer on Stack Overflow whenever someone asks the same question.

How Zalgo text works

Zalgo text is plain text. Each letter is followed by a pile of combining marks. A combining mark has no width of its own. It is drawn on, through or under the character before it, the way the accent sits on é.

Most Zalgo marks come from one Unicode block, Combining Diacritical Marks, from U+0300 to U+036F. It holds 112 marks: accents, lines, dots, hooks and even tiny letters, like the small e on top of uͤ. The strikethrough and underline generator uses single marks from the same block for neater effects.

Paste any Zalgo text in the inspector to see how it is built. Tap a letter to list its marks.

A heavy line holds far more marks than letters. The word Zalgo at the Chaos setting has 5 letters and about 100 marks.

Why Zalgo text spills over other lines

Every line of text gets a fixed height from the font. Marks above and below a letter do not make the line taller. They are drawn outside it, right over the lines above and below.

Web pages usually let the marks spill. Most chat apps put each message in its own box and cut off what sticks out, so the same Zalgo looks shorter there. Switch between the two below.

For a few spooky letters that stay readable, use Light or Medium. Save Chaos for places where covering the text around it is the joke.

How much Zalgo fits: character limits

Every mark counts as a character. X, for example, counts each mark as one character, just like a letter. At the Medium setting one letter with its marks takes about 7 characters, so Zalgo uses up limits fast.

The last column follows the settings in the tool at the top: about 7 characters per letter.

Some apps also limit how many marks one letter can carry, or remove them all. Unicode suggests a limit of its own: its stream safe text format allows no more than 30 marks in a row. Longer chains are often cut short when you post.

Is Zalgo text safe?

Yes. Zalgo text is only characters, so it cannot run code or carry a virus. The worst it can do is cover other text and make a page hard to read.

Very long chains have caused trouble before. Some versions of Apple's Messages app crashed when they had to draw Zalgo text. Apps handle it much better now, but many forums, games and chat apps still limit it to keep pages readable.

Screen readers get every mark as its own character. Some read each mark out by name, others skip them. Keep Zalgo away from names, buttons and anything people need to read, and give the plain words too when it matters.

How to remove Zalgo text

Paste the text below. The cleaner removes the marks and keeps the letters.

The cleaner works in two steps. First it joins each letter with its accent where Unicode has one character for the pair, a step called NFC. That is why é and ñ survive. Then it removes the marks that are left, but only marks from the blocks Zalgo uses. Hindi, Arabic and other scripts that need marks for their vowels stay intact.

Zalgo text in code

Developers can make Zalgo text with a few lines of JavaScript. This adds up to three random marks from U+0300 to U+036F to each letter:

const marks = Array.from({ length: 112 }, (_, i) => String.fromCodePoint(0x300 + i));
const pick = () => marks[Math.random() * marks.length | 0];
const zalgo = text => [...text].map(c => c + Array.from({ length: Math.random() * 4 | 0 }, pick).join("")).join("");

To clean it up, or to cap it at a few marks per letter in a comment box:

const clean = text => text.normalize("NFC").replace(/[̀-ͯ]/g, "");
const tame = text => text.replace(/(\p{M}{3})\p{M}+/gu, "$1");

The second line keeps the first three marks on every letter and drops the rest, so normal accents still work.