Zalgo text is plain text that has been buried under layers of Unicode combining marks so it appears to be glitching, melting, or corrupted. The style is named after a creepypasta and is widely used for spooky social-media posts, horror-themed usernames, and the classic “he comes” meme. This generator adds randomised marks on demand with adjustable intensity.
How it works
Unicode defines hundreds of combining characters that have no width of their own — they render on top of the previous base character. Zalgo text exploits three groups: marks that sit above a letter (U+0300 to U+036F upper range), marks that sit below it (lower range), and overlay or mid marks. For every character in your input, the tool appends a random number of marks from the enabled groups, up to the intensity you set. Spaces and existing characters are kept, with marks simply stacking onto whatever came before.
The Unicode mechanics behind the glitch
Every character you see on screen is one or more Unicode code points. Most Latin letters are a single code point that renders as a complete glyph. But Unicode also defines combining characters — code points that have no standalone glyph and instead attach to the preceding base character. Accent marks like the acute (U+0301) and grave (U+0300) work this way: they are designed to sit over a vowel to form é or à.
Zalgo exploits the fact that Unicode does not enforce a maximum number of combining marks on any base character. A renderer will faithfully stack as many as you provide, and at high counts the combining marks extend far above and below the baseline, visually colliding with the lines of text above and below. This is the “melting” or “towering” effect.
The specific code points used come from several Unicode blocks:
- Combining Diacritical Marks (U+0300–U+036F): The original Latin accent block, repurposed for the upper and lower towers.
- Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (U+1DC0–U+1DFF): Additional marks for more variety.
- Combining Half Marks (U+FE20–U+FE2F): Overlapping mid-character marks for the “through” effect.
Intensity levels and platform compatibility
The intensity slider controls the maximum number of combining marks added per base character. At low intensity (1–3 marks per character) the effect is subtle — text looks slightly wobbly or accented. At medium intensity (5–10 marks) the visual corruption is obvious and extends slightly into adjacent lines. At high intensity (15+ marks) the marks stack far above and below, creating the classic Zalgo tower.
Not all platforms render high-intensity Zalgo without intervention. Some clamp the number of combining marks per character for readability (Twitter and some Discord settings). Others strip them entirely as part of input sanitisation. If the effect is truncated on your target platform, reducing intensity to the 5–8 range usually survives.
Practical uses and limitations
Zalgo is used for:
- Horror-themed social media posts and usernames — the corrupted appearance matches the aesthetic.
- Game and fiction character names — a villain or eldritch entity name in Zalgo is a well-understood genre signal.
- The “he comes” and similar memes — the format originated on Something Awful forums and has a long internet history.
One important limit: Zalgo is a visual effect, not obfuscation. The underlying letters are unchanged, so a copy-paste recovers the original text, screen readers read the base characters, and search engines index them normally. Do not use Zalgo text to hide information.
Tips
- Higher intensity makes the corruption spill into neighbouring lines, which looks dramatic but can be filtered or clamped by some platforms.
- If a site rejects or shortens the output, reduce the intensity or disable the up or down direction.
- Spaces between words generally do not get marks, which keeps the word boundaries visible even at high intensity.