Cursed Text Generator

Cursed text, or Zalgo text, is ordinary text with combining marks piled on every letter until it looks like it is leaking out of the line. The six curses use the same marks in different amounts and directions, and Curse power scales them all together. The table shows what each does to “It is right behind you” at power 4.

The line is 22 characters on screen in every row; the length column is what it actually takes up once each mark is counted as a character. Uneasy is the one to use where people still need to read it at a glance, such as a display name. Haunted and Zalgo suit titles and captions. Abyss is for a single word or two with plenty of empty space around it. For a lighter, digital interference look rather than horror, try the glitch text generator.

Zalgo began in 2004 on the Something Awful forums, where a member posted edited comic strips in which the characters’ eyes bled and their speech dissolved into distorted lettering, ending with the cry “Zalgo!”. Readers built a legend around it: Zalgo as a nameless, Lovecraft-style entity that corrupts whatever it touches, with “He comes” as its calling card. Text that seems to break the screen it is shown on became the meme’s signature.

Its best-known appearance is a Stack Overflow answer by the user bobince, posted on 13 November 2009 in reply to a question about matching HTML tags with regular expressions. The answer argues that it cannot be done, and as it goes on the text itself decays into Zalgo, finishing with “he comes”. The Creeping curse here is built on the same idea: normal at first, consumed by the end.

Zalgo has escaped the screen at least once. In 2020 a student had “hamburger” in Zalgo text printed as a school yearbook caption, and the marks ran over his photo and the one below it. Print has no line box to clip them.

Creeping multiplies the Zalgo amounts by a factor that grows along the line, from nothing on the first letter to double on the last. The growth is squared, so the start stays clean for longer and the end goes bad quickly:

Worked example. At power 4, “It is right behind you” comes out with 0 marks on “It”, 1 on “is”, 9 across “right”, 49 across “behind” and 47 across “you”, three letters with as many marks as six. Because the average of 2t² over the line is two-thirds, Creeping uses about two-thirds of the marks of plain Zalgo, but puts them where the sentence lands. It works best on a line whose last words are the payoff.

Dripping puts every mark below the letters, so the text seems to hang and run downwards. Marks below are less likely to be cut off at the top of a chat bubble or post, which makes Dripping a good choice where the space above is tight.

Unicode places no limit on how many marks can follow a letter, but its normalisation annex defines a Stream-Safe Text Format: no run of more than 30 combining marks. The number was chosen as far beyond anything a real language needs, so software can process text in small fixed buffers. Text over the limit is still valid, but programs that follow the stream-safe process insert an invisible joiner (U+034F) to break up long runs.

With the 30-mark option on, which is the default, no letter gets more than 30 marks however high the power goes. Only Abyss reaches it, as the table for “HE COMES” shows.

Some apps have struggled with very long runs of marks. Wikipedia’s Zalgo text article cites reports of Zalgo messages crashing the iOS Messages app and Gmail. Those bugs have been fixed, but it is a good reason to keep the limit on and to avoid sending Abyss text to people who did not ask for it.

Sighted readers see a word under the marks. Software does not. Screen readers handle combining marks in different ways: some read the letters and skip the marks, some announce each mark by name, and some give up on the word. Search, translation and text-to-speech treat the marks as part of the word, so cursed text is rarely found by searching for the plain word.

If what the text says matters, give the plain version too: in a post, put it in the caption or alt text; in an image, write it in the alt text. On a web page, show the cursed text to the eye and the plain text to assistive technology:

Paste cursed text into the box and an Uncursed row appears with the marks removed. The hard part is keeping real accents. A common trick, decomposing the text and deleting every combining mark, turns café into cafe and Việt into Viet along with the curse:

The generator is more careful:

• Accented letters typed as one character, such as é, are never touched.
• A letter is cleaned if it carries three or more separate marks, or any overlay or rare mark.
• If more than 40% of the letters carry marks, the whole text is taken as cursed and every separate mark goes, because light curses look just like ordinary accents.

Worked example. “A̷n̷ ̷o̷l̷d̷ café”, with a slash through each of the first six characters, comes back as “An old café”: 6 marks removed and the é kept. “Crème brûlée, Việt Nam” pasted on its own is left exactly as it is.