Cursed text generator

What makes text look cursed

Unicode allows any number of combining diacritical marks to attach to a single base character. That is a deliberate design choice — it is how scripts with stacked vowel and tone marks work. Layout engines therefore draw every mark they are given, and if you stack thirty of them the result climbs vertically out of the line.

Cursed text — also called zalgo, after the internet horror meme it grew out of around 2009 — is nothing more than that: your letters with randomly chosen marks piled above and below.

Three intensities

The output is deterministic: the marks are chosen from each character's position rather than from a random number generator, so the same input always produces exactly the same cursed text. Regenerate it tomorrow and you get an identical string.

Why it overflows the line

Text layout reserves space for a line based on the font's declared ascent and descent. Combining marks are drawn relative to the base character and can extend arbitrarily far, and no engine grows the line box to fit them. That overlap is the entire aesthetic — and also the reason moderators dislike it, because a single heavy message can make several lines of a chat log unreadable.

Where it will get you in trouble

• Discord. Many servers have automod rules against zalgo, and heavy stacking can measurably slow the client's rendering.
• Usernames. Most platforms strip or reject combining marks in handles, and some treat the attempt as an impersonation risk.
• Anywhere it obscures other people's text. This is the line most communities actually enforce — decorating your own message is fine, making the channel unreadable is not.

Light intensity is the safe default when you just want the effect without the fallout.

It is unreadable to assistive technology

Screen readers handle stacked combining marks unpredictably: some announce each mark by name, producing a minute of speech for one word, and others give up on the word entirely. Never use cursed text for anything a reader needs.

Cleaning it up

Removing the marks is straightforward if you have a text editor with regex support: strip everything in the Unicode ranges U+0300–U+036F, U+1AB0–U+1AFF and U+20D0–U+20F0, and the base letters remain. In JavaScript, text.normalize('NFD').replace(/\p{M}/gu, '') does it in one line — which also removes legitimate accents, so use it on cursed text only.

Generated in your browser

The mark stacking is plain string arithmetic performed here as you type. Nothing is uploaded, and no request is made — the page works with the network disconnected.