You have seen it in a Discord member list late at night. A name that looks like it is melting, with spikes growing out of letters and strokes bleeding into the lines above and below. It looks broken. That is the point. That is glitch text.

Glitch 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. Your phone just draws it in a way that looks corrupted. People also call it Zalgo text, cursed text or corrupted text. Those names overlap, but they are not quite the same thing.

Unicode has characters called combining characters, mostly in the range U+0300 to U+036F. They were made to attach to the letter before them and add a small mark, like an accent. A glitch generator uses a simple fact: nothing in Unicode says you can only add one mark. Stack several marks above a letter, a few through the middle and several below it, and the letter drowns. Do that to every letter 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 glitch text behaves strangely. A short name with heavy Zalgo can secretly be hundreds of characters long, because every mark counts. 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 glitch for decoration, never for important information.

Glitch, Zalgo, cursed and corrupted: what is the difference

Zalgo is the original heavy style, with tall spikes above and roots below. Cursed is Zalgo pushed to the limit, barely readable and best for single words. Corrupted mixes symbol swaps into the letters as well as marks, for a broken-data or hacker look. Glitch is the general name for all of them. If a site only offers one of these, you end up opening several more tabs. That is why all of them live on this page.

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.
• Marks through: strokes that cut across the middle. A little goes a long way. Too much and the letter disappears.
• Marks below: roots hanging underneath, dripping into the line below. Turn these off if your text sits in a tight list or menu.

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.

How to remove glitch text

Paste the glitched 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

Glitch 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 glitched form only. Glitch the decoration, keep the message clean.

Glitch Text for Discord

Using glitch text for Discord is simple: make your text in the tool above, copy it, and paste it into Discord as a display name, a server nickname, or a chat message. Discord shows the combining marks the same way most apps do, so what you see in the preview is close to what your friends will see.

Watch the limit. A Discord display name allows only 32 characters, and every combining mark counts toward that limit, so a heavy Zalgo name gets cut off fast. Keep it light for names: use Subtle or Platform Safe, short words only, and check the platform checker above before you commit to a name.

Discord sometimes trims or flattens heavy text because long stacks of marks get clipped in member lists and on some devices. For one scary word in a message, go heavier. For a name you will keep, stay light.