Corrupt normal text with diacritical fury for fun. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Fun / Niche collection.
Use Cases
Creating creepy text effects for Halloween marketing campaigns
Testing how applications handle excessive Unicode combining marks
Generating glitch-art text for creative design projects
Stress-testing text rendering in web and mobile applications
Tips
Adjust the intensity slider for more or less diacritical chaos
Copy the output for spooky social media posts or Halloween themes
Use sparingly — screen readers cannot interpret Zalgo text
Fun Facts
Zalgo text works by stacking Unicode combining diacritical marks (U+0300 to U+036F) above and below base characters, exploiting the Unicode rendering engine.
The Zalgo meme originated from a 2004 Something Awful forum post about a fictional eldritch entity that corrupts everything it touches.
Some websites and apps strip combining characters to prevent Zalgo text from breaking layouts — Discord, for example, limits the number of combining marks.
FAQ
What makes text 'Zalgo'?
Stacking combining diacritical marks above/below/through characters. Unicode allows unlimited marks per base char, producing the glitchy 'corrupted' look.
How intense should I go?
Low (1–2 marks) for subtle creepy effect. High (5+) for chaotic. Very high stacks overflow line height and can break page layout.
Will it render everywhere?
Most modern systems yes. Very old or niche fonts may render boxes for some combining marks. Test in the target environment.
How do I remove Zalgo?
Run through Unicode Normalizer (NFC form) — most combining marks are stripped. Zalgo without precomposed base characters stays; most cases are cleaned up.
