Zalgo text is the messy, dripping lettering that seems to spill out of its line: H̨̭̀͂͢ͅe̴̞̿̀l̟̃͘ļ̻̽͘ọ̴͈ͣ̉͘. It takes its name from a mid-2000s internet horror meme, and it has stuck around as shorthand for anything cursed, haunted or broken. Gamers use it for spooky names, creators use it for Halloween captions, and meme pages use it whenever a joke needs to look possessed.
Type your text, set the Intensity slider and choose whether marks should pile up Above, through the Middle or Below each letter. Press Generate new to reshuffle the marks until the pattern looks right, then copy or download the result. All of it happens in your browser.
How Zalgo text works
Unicode has a class of characters called combining marks. They have no width of their own and are drawn on top of the previous character; the acute accent in é can be stored as a plain e followed by a combining acute accent, U+0301. The Combining Diacritical Marks block, U+0300 to U+036F, contains over a hundred of them: accents, tildes, rings, hooks, strokes and bars meant for real languages.
Nothing in Unicode limits how many marks may follow one letter. Zalgo exploits that by attaching many of them at once, so they stack upwards, downwards and through the letter until it overflows the line. This generator sorts the marks into three pools by where they are drawn, then adds a random number from each enabled pool to every letter and digit. Spaces, punctuation and emoji are left clean, which keeps word boundaries readable.
When Zalgo text fits
Horror and Halloween content
A Zalgo title on a scary story, a haunted house invite or a Halloween post signals the mood instantly, with no image editing needed. A low intensity keeps the words legible.
Creepy game and server names
Players use light Zalgo for villain characters, horror-themed Discord servers or role-play accounts. Heavier settings often get trimmed by name fields, so start at 1 or 2.
Glitch aesthetics and memes
Glitchcore art, vaporwave posts and cursed-image captions use Zalgo to suggest corrupted data or a malfunctioning screen. It pairs well with upside-down or strikethrough text for the same effect.
Intensity, direction and randomness
Intensity runs from 1 to 10 and defaults to 4. At each letter, every enabled direction adds between one and twice the intensity in marks, so the setting caps how tall the stacks can grow: at 1, a letter gets at most two marks per direction, and at 10 it can collect up to twenty from each. The Above, Middle and Below switches choose the pools; turning off Middle, for example, gives cleaner letters with growths above and below only.
The marks are picked with a seeded random generator, so the same text and settings always give the same result until you press Generate new, which rolls a fresh seed for a completely different arrangement. Expect the character count to explode: in a test, five letters at intensity 10 became about 150 characters, which matters on any platform with a length limit.
Come usare questo strumento
- Type or paste your text into the input box.
- Move the Intensity slider; 2 to 4 gives a readable glitch, 8 to 10 is chaos.
- Switch Above, Middle and Below on or off to shape where the marks appear.
- Press Generate new until you like the pattern, then press Copy or Download.
Where Zalgo text breaks
- Many apps clip tall stacks, cap the number of marks per letter or refuse heavy Zalgo outright, and the behaviour changes between versions.
- Every mark counts as a character on most platforms, so heavy settings eat through length limits quickly.
- Screen readers may read out each mark or skip the word entirely, so keep Zalgo away from information people need.
- Overflowing marks can cover nearby lines, which is why some communities ban Zalgo in chat. Check a server's rules first.