How Zalgo text works
Glitch text is ordinary letters buried under combining diacritical marks, the same kind of characters that can put an accent on é or a tilde on ñ. Unicode lets a letter carry any number of them, so the font stacks mark after mark above and below the letter until they spill into the lines around it.
The three strengths here add random marks to every letter: light uses one to three, medium three to nine, and heavy ten to twenty. Spaces stay clean, so words remain separate. The name comes from Zalgo, a creepy internet meme from the mid-2000s, and people also call the effect cursed, corrupted or scary text.
Where glitch text works
Because it is real text, Zalgo pastes into Discord messages and nicknames, X posts, TikTok and Instagram bios, and many game names. Light glitching is the safest choice for names, since it stays readable and short.
Save heavy Zalgo for a single scary word in a Halloween post or a horror story title, and pair it with skull symbols or other Halloween symbols for extra atmosphere.
Before you post it
Some apps and sites strip combining marks, limit how many can sit on one letter, or reject messages that contain a lot of them. Some Discord servers and forums also ban heavy Zalgo in their rules, because it covers other people's messages. If your text gets cut off or removed, try the light style or a shorter word.
Every mark counts as a character, so a ten-letter word in heavy Zalgo takes up more than 100 characters of a limit. Screen readers may read out each mark or skip the word, and search will not find it, so keep important text plain. For a single clean line through letters instead, use the strikethrough text generator.