Zalgo text is ordinary text buried under dozens of Unicode combining marks, so the marks spill far above and below each letter and the words look corrupted. It takes its name from Zalgo, a horror meme that began on internet forums in 2004. You can make your own with our free zalgo text generator.
The short answer
Zalgo text looks like this. h̷̢̩̬e̯̥̍̈ͣ́̊ c̞ͩo̷͙̳͕͍ͣ̃ͫm̒e̵̞̝̓̾ͭ͒̚s̊͋
Underneath the chaos are normal letters. On top of each one sit many small marks, such as accents, hooks, dots and lines, stacked so high and low that they crash into the lines around them. The effect suggests something has broken through the screen, which is exactly the feeling the original meme was after.
Where Zalgo came from
Zalgo began in 2004 on the Something Awful forums. A user named Dave Kelly, known online as Shmorky, posted edited versions of well known newspaper comic strips. In each one, the last panel had gone horribly wrong. Eyes bled, faces melted and characters repeated a single phrase, he comes. The mysterious force behind the corruption was called Zalgo.
Other forum members joined in, editing more comics and inventing lore. Over time Zalgo grew into a creepypasta figure, often described as a chaotic entity waiting behind a wall between fiction and reality. When people wanted text that looked as corrupted as those comics, they found that stacking Unicode marks did the job, and the style took the name of the meme.
How zalgo text works
Every character on your screen is part of the Unicode standard. Unicode includes a group called combining marks. These have no width of their own. They attach to the character before them, which is how a plain e plus an accent mark becomes é.
Normally a letter gets one or two marks. Zalgo text gives each letter many, from three zones.
| Zone | Example marks | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Above | Accents, hooks, small letters | Towers rising into the line above |
| Through | Strokes and slashes | Lines cutting across the letter |
| Below | Dots, rings, lines | Drips hanging into the line below |
Because the marks are real characters, zalgo text survives copy and paste. That is also why it can be surprisingly long. A five letter word with ten marks on each letter is fifty five characters.
Zalgo, glitch, cursed and creepy text
Zalgo inspired a family of related styles, each using the same marks in different amounts.
- Zalgo is the heaviest, with marks in every direction.
- Glitch text uses fewer marks, mostly cutting through letters, for a broken screen look.
- Cursed text mixes light marks with lookalike letters from other alphabets.
- Creepy text hangs marks below letters so they appear to drip.
Why some places block zalgo text
Zalgo is harmless as text, but it can be a nuisance.
- It covers other messages. Tall stacks spill over the lines above and below, which can hide nearby messages in a chat.
- It slows things down. Very long zalgo text takes more work to draw, and in rare cases has made simple apps lag.
- It is hard to moderate. Search and filters struggle to read zalgo words, so it can be used to dodge word filters.
- It hurts accessibility. Screen readers may read every mark aloud or skip the word.
For these reasons, many Discord servers ban zalgo names, and some platforms remove combining marks or cap how many a letter can carry.
How to remove zalgo text
If someone sends you zalgo text and you want to read it, or you pasted it somewhere by mistake, you have a few options.
- Copy the original. If you made it yourself, go back to your plain text and copy that instead.
- Use a plain text editor. Some code editors and online tools can strip combining marks, leaving only the base letters.
- Retype it. For short phrases, reading through the marks and typing the words again is often fastest.
On Discord and many other apps, moderators can remove messages that overflow the chat. If zalgo text is making a channel unreadable, report it to a moderator.
Zalgo in internet culture today
Zalgo is now one of the best known pieces of early internet horror, alongside other creepypasta figures from the same era. The phrase he comes still appears in jokes about anything going wrong, from a crashing game to a printer that will not cooperate. The text style has outlived the original comics, and many people who use zalgo text today have never seen the meme that named it.
How to use zalgo text well
Zalgo is best as a short, dramatic accent. A single zalgo word in a spooky caption or a Halloween event title can be striking. Keep it short, use a medium intensity, and leave anything important, like dates and links, in plain text. Our generator lets you control intensity and direction, so you can keep the effect readable.
If you post in Discord, check the server rules first, and see our Discord styling guide for styles that are easier to read. For a playful style that is less chaotic, try typing upside down.