Glitch Text Generator
Glitch text is Zalgo tuned for a digital-corruption look rather than a horror one: marks that cut through the letters like scan lines and dropped frames. Type below and copy the result.
Glitch Text Generator
Everything runs in your browser — your text is never uploaded.
How to use it
Enter your text — type or paste it into the left box.
Dial in the distortion — a level of 20–30 with marks below switched off gives the classic corrupted-signal look.
Copy the glitched text — paste it into a username, caption, stream title or comment.
What makes text look glitched?
Three separate visual tricks combine into what people call glitch text.
- Marks that strike through the letter — slashes, tildes and overlays that break the letterform the way a corrupted scan line breaks an image.
- Vertical bleed — marks above and below spill into neighbouring lines, mimicking the way a failing display smears rows of pixels.
- Irregularity — every character gets a different random number of marks, so the damage looks organic instead of patterned. Uniform distortion reads as a filter; uneven distortion reads as a fault.
The generator above leans on the first two and randomises the third on every keystroke.
Glitch text vs Zalgo text
Technically they are the same mechanism — Unicode combining marks — and people use the words interchangeably. In practice a useful distinction has emerged:
| Glitch text | Zalgo text | |
|---|---|---|
| Feel | Digital, technological, broken hardware | Occult, horror, something is wrong |
| Typical intensity | Low to medium; words stay readable | Medium to extreme |
| Mark emphasis | Strike-through and short marks | Tall stacks above and below |
| Common use | Gaming names, tech memes, vaporwave edits | Halloween, creepypasta, horror edits |
Both come out of the same tool — the only difference is how you set the slider and which mark groups you leave switched on.
Getting a convincing corrupted-signal look
- Keep the level between 15 and 35. Glitch reads as damage to something that still works; total corruption reads as noise.
- Turn off marks below. Damage concentrated above the baseline looks more like a display fault than a summoning.
- Glitch only part of the phrase. Run three words through the tool, leave the rest clean, and paste them back together. Selective damage is far more convincing than uniform damage.
- Reroll a few times. Randomisation means one press of Randomize again can be the difference between messy and menacing.
Why the effect exists at all
Unicode had to solve a real problem: the world's writing systems place an enormous number of accents on letters, and encoding every letter-plus-accent combination separately would have been impossible. The solution was combining characters — zero-width marks that attach to the character before them.
The standard deliberately does not cap how many can stack, because some scripts legitimately need several at once. Glitch text exploits that open-ended design. It is not a bug and not an exploit; it is a flexible system being used far outside its intended range.
Modern browsers are wise to it. Most now clamp how far marks may overflow their line box, which is why the same string looks wilder in a plain text editor than in a web app.
Frequently asked questions
What is glitch text?
Glitch text is normal text overloaded with Unicode combining marks so it looks like a corrupted digital signal. It is real text, so you can copy and paste it anywhere.
Is glitch text the same as Zalgo?
They use the same Unicode mechanism. In common usage, glitch text is lighter and more technological-looking, while Zalgo is heavier and more horror-themed.
Does glitch text work in Discord usernames?
Yes, and it renders well. Keep the level low so the name stays inside one line in the member list.
Will glitch text get me banned?
Not by itself — it is ordinary text. Some communities do have rules against disruptive formatting, so check the server or subreddit rules before spamming it.
Can I undo glitch text?
Yes. Paste it into the Zalgo to normal text tool and every mark is stripped away.
Why does it look different on my phone?
Mobile apps clamp how far marks may overflow a line so that one message cannot cover others. Lower the craziness level for a result that survives on mobile.