You have seen it in a Discord member list or a horror meme: a name that looks like it is melting, with spikes growing out of the letters and roots bleeding into the lines above and below. It looks broken on purpose. That is Zalgo text, named after the internet horror character Zalgo, and described in more detail on Wikipedia’s Zalgo text page.

Zalgo text is normal text with extra Unicode characters piled on top of it. It is not a font and it is not an image. It is real text you can copy, paste, and send, and your phone just draws it in a way that looks corrupted. The trick uses combining characters, mostly in the Unicode range U+0300 to U+036F. These characters were made to attach to the letter before them and add a small mark, like an accent over a vowel. Nothing in Unicode says you can only add one mark, so a generator stacks several above each letter, a few through the middle, and several below it. The letter drowns in marks, and the whole line spills out of its box. Underneath, your original word is still there. Strip the marks and it comes back clean, which is exactly what the remover on this page does.

That is also why Zalgo text behaves strangely. A short name at heavy intensity can secretly be hundreds of characters long, because every mark counts toward a limit. It is why the same text looks tall and spiky in one app and flat in another: each app draws the stack with its own font. And it is why screen readers struggle with it: they try to read every mark out loud. Keep heavy Zalgo for decoration, never for important information.

The three layers: above, through, and below

• Marks above: spikes and crowns growing out of the top of each letter. This is the classic Zalgo look, and the first layer to keep.
• Marks through: strokes that cut across the middle. A little goes a long way. Too much and the letter disappears behind the strokes.
• Marks below: roots hanging underneath, dripping into the line below. Turn these off if your text sits in a tight list or menu where the roots would overlap other names.

Try this: turn off marks through, keep marks above and below on, and set intensity to about 30 percent. You get a clean, readable name with a cursed halo. That combination is impossible on a one-slider generator, and it is the first thing to try here.

Zalgo, cursed, and corrupted: what is the difference

Zalgo is the original heavy style, with tall spikes above and roots below. Cursed text is Zalgo pushed to the limit, barely readable and best for single words. Corrupted text mixes symbol swaps into the letters as well as marks, for a broken-data look. If you want all the styles together, not just Zalgo, use our main Glitch Text Generator, which has 13 styles on one page. This page stays focused on Zalgo only, so it can go deeper on intensity and control.

How to remove Zalgo text

Paste the Zalgo text into the remover at the top of this page. It strips the combining marks and leaves the plain letters. If you made the text here, your clean original is also still in the input box at the top, because the generator never changes your original text.

A quick word on accessibility

Zalgo text is a visual effect, and that is all it is. Screen readers may read out dozens of mark names per letter, and people with low vision cannot parse heavy Zalgo at all. Never put essential information, like a link, a price, a warning, or contact details, in Zalgo form only. Glitch the decoration, keep the message clean.