Cross Out Text Anywhere
Strikethrough is one of the most expressive things you can do with plain text. It shows a revision, marks something as done, or delivers a joke by visibly "taking back" a word. This strikethrough text generator adds the line using Unicode combining marks, which attach to each character and travel with the text when copied.
The page also includes underline, double underline, overline, slashed and tilde variants — all built the same way, all pasteable into fields that offer no formatting at all.
How Combining Marks Work
Unlike bold or cursive, strikethrough is not a separate alphabet. It works by pairing each normal letter with an invisible-on-its-own combining character that the renderer draws through, under or over it. The letter "a" plus U+0336 (Combining Long Stroke Overlay) becomes a̶ — still the letter a, now with a line across it.
Two practical consequences follow. First, your text remains searchable and readable to software, because the underlying letters are unchanged. Second, your character count roughly doubles, since every visible character is actually two code points. A 280-character post limit becomes about 140 letters of strikethrough.
| Style | Preview | Mark used |
|---|---|---|
| Strikethrough | c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ | Long stroke overlay |
| Light strikethrough | c̵r̵o̵s̵s̵e̵d̵ ̵o̵u̵t̵ | Short stroke overlay |
| Slashed | c̸r̸o̸s̸s̸e̸d̸ ̸o̸u̸t̸ | Long solidus overlay |
| Underline | c̲r̲o̲s̲s̲e̲d̲ ̲o̲u̲t̲ | Combining low line |
| Double underline | c̳r̳o̳s̳s̳e̳d̳ ̳o̳u̳t̳ | Double low line |
| Overline | c̅r̅o̅s̅s̅e̅d̅ ̅o̅u̅t̅ | Combining overline |
Where Strikethrough Is Genuinely Useful
- Price changes — $̶9̶9̶ $49 is instantly understood in an ad or a bio link line.
- Comedic correction — "my ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶l̶e̶m̶ opportunity" is a joke that only works visually.
- To-do lists — crossing off completed items in a Notion page, Trello card or Discord pinned message.
- Editing in public — showing what changed in a corrected post rather than silently deleting it.
- Spoiler-ish teasing — though for genuine spoilers, Discord's
||spoiler||tags are the correct tool.
Platform Notes
WhatsApp has native strikethrough: wrap text in tildes, ~like this~. Discord uses double tildes, ~~like this~~, in messages. Slack also supports tilde syntax. In all three, native formatting is preferable because it is accessible and does not inflate your character count.
Use Unicode strikethrough where those shortcuts do not exist: Instagram bios and captions, X posts, TikTok, YouTube titles and descriptions, Discord nicknames and channel names, Google Docs comments, and any form field that accepts only plain text.
Rendering Quirks to Expect
Combining marks are drawn by the text engine, and engines disagree slightly. On some Android builds the line sits a pixel or two lower than on iOS. In a few fonts the stroke does not quite meet across the space between words, producing a dashed effect. Overline is the most inconsistent of the set, because fewer fonts include a well-positioned glyph for it.
Also worth knowing: a handful of platforms strip combining marks entirely as an anti-abuse measure, since long chains of them are what produce Zalgo text. If your pasted strikethrough comes out as plain letters, that is why — the platform removed the marks.
More Free Text Tools
🌸 Aesthetic Fonts
Vaporwave, soft and cottagecore.
🖤 Gothic Text
Old English and blackletter.
👻 Zalgo Glitch
Cursed and corrupted text.
🙃 Upside Down
Flip your text 180 degrees.