Zalgo Text Generator & Remover — Glitch Text

Text that has been overloaded with “combining” characters — marks that Unicode stacks on top of, below and through the letter they follow. A few produce an accented letter; a great many produce the glitched, dripping look the style is named after.

Yes. The letters are unchanged; only combining marks are added around them. That is why it can be stripped back to the original, and why a search will usually fail to match it.

They set how many combining marks are added per character: light is roughly one, medium one to four, heavy three to six, and max from six upward. More marks mean a stronger glitch and a longer string.

Yes — the strip direction removes the combining marks and returns readable text. Note that it removes ordinary combining accents too, so a precomposed é survives but an é built from e + accent does not.

Mostly decoration: usernames, social posts and horror or glitch aesthetics. It is deliberately hostile to screen readers and search, so avoid it wherever the text needs to be read or found.

Yes — they are the same effect under different names. “Corruption text”, “cursed text”, “glitch text”, “glitch text generator” and “Zalgo” all describe text overloaded with combining marks so it looks broken, dripping or possessed. This generator produces that look at four intensities and can strip it back out again, so whatever name you came looking for, the control is the same.

Type your text, pick an intensity from light to max and press “Zalgo it”. Light adds roughly one combining mark per character for a subtle stutter; max stacks six or more for a heavy, dripping corruption. To undo it, paste glitched text and use “Strip marks” to recover readable text.

Yes — the same page is both a generator and a Zalgo text remover. Paste the glitched, corrupted or cursed text into the box and press “Strip marks”. The decoder removes the stacked combining marks and returns plain, readable text, which is what you want when a username, comment or message arrives unreadable. Note that stripping removes ordinary combining accents as well, so a precomposed é survives while an é built from “e” plus a separate accent does not.

“Zalgo” is the name of an internet meme — a Creepypasta-style figure said to “come” and corrupt text and images — that spread through web forums in the 2000s. The buffered, dripping text it was associated with took its name from the character, and “Zalgo text” has since become the standard term for any text overloaded with combining marks. It does not stand for anything technical and has no meaning in Unicode; it is just the popular label for this glitch effect, which is also called horror text, cursed text, glitch text or corruption text.