Zalgo Text Generator
Turn text into the glitchy, overflowing style that looks like a corrupted file. Three intensity levels, from a light flicker to fully unreadable.
Your text
Click any style below to copy it. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
3 styles
How zalgo works
Zalgo stacks combining diacritical marks — the accents that normally sit on a single letter — dozens deep. Unicode expects a letter to carry one or two of these; nothing in the standard says it cannot carry forty. Renderers stack them faithfully until the glyphs spill above and below the line.
That means the underlying text is not corrupted at all. Strip the combining marks and your original letters come back intact, which is exactly what the copy is: your text plus a pile of accents.
Where it came from
From a 2004 Something Awful thread about a comic where distorted text signalled something wrong with reality, and the name stuck. It spread as a creepypasta convention and became internet shorthand for corruption and dread.
It also became a genuine nuisance. Heavy zalgo can break layouts by overflowing containers, and some sites reject it outright for that reason. Keep it to short bursts.