How cursed text is made
Zalgo text works by stacking combining marks on top of ordinary letters. A combining mark is a real Unicode character designed to sit above, below, or through the character before it, so piling several onto one letter makes it sprout upward and downward until it bleeds into the lines around it. Nothing is broken and nothing is an image: it is text doing exactly what it was specified to do, just far more of it than anyone intended.
The intensity slider runs from 1 to 8 and starts at 3. Each step adds more marks per character, so a setting of 3 puts around five marks on every letter and a setting of 8 puts around twelve. The caption changes as you drag it, from slightly haunted through properly cursed to beyond saving.
The marks are picked at random from two sets, one that stacks upward and one that stacks downward. That means the same input regenerates differently each time you change something, so if you land on a version you like, copy it before you touch the slider again.
- Type a line into the input box
- Drag the intensity slider from 1 to 8
- Press Copy on the style you want
The other four styles
Fraktur renders your text in the blackletter mathematical alphabet, which reads as gothic and old without being unreadable. Double-struck is the outlined blackboard style used for mathematical sets, which looks hollow and cold. Both come from dedicated Unicode blocks, so they are single characters rather than stacked marks.
Strikethrough and squared work differently again. Strikethrough adds one combining line through every character, which unlike the offset styles works on punctuation, digits, and any alphabet. Squared boxes each letter in the enclosed alphanumeric block, giving a blocky, tile-like look, and it maps upper and lower case to the same glyphs.
A practical note on all of them: the styles are built by shifting letter codes, so they cover A to Z and a to z. Accented letters, Cyrillic, CJK, and most punctuation pass through unchanged in the offset-based styles. Strikethrough is the exception, since a combining mark attaches to anything.
Where it works and where it will not
Because the output is text, it pastes into bios, display names, chat messages, and captions on most platforms. Platforms that filter or normalize Unicode will strip it, and some will silently truncate the combining marks while keeping the base letters, so test in the place you intend to use it before writing a whole post.
Heavy zalgo can also overflow its line and cover text above and below, which is the effect people want and also the reason some apps reject it. If it looks fine in your browser and vanishes after posting, that is filtering rather than a fault in the text.
Worth saying plainly: this is decorative, not a font. Screen readers announce combining marks and mathematical alphabet characters individually, so a name in cursed text can be read out as a long string of character descriptions. Keep it out of anything that has to be accessible, and out of anything that needs to be searchable, since search does not match these characters to their plain equivalents.
- Test on the destination platform before committing to it
- Some platforms strip combining marks silently
- Screen readers read these characters out one by one