Type below to c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ your text with a real Unicode strikethrough that travels with the characters — no formatting toolbar, no markdown, just copy and paste the struck-through result anywhere.
Example: Hello → H̶e̶l̶l̶o̶
The same text, nine other ways — or convert into all ten styles at once:
This generator uses U+0336, the combining long stroke overlay, from Unicode's Combining Diacritical Marks block. Combining characters have zero width of their own and render on top of the character that precedes them — the same mechanism that builds é from e plus a combining acute accent. This tool appends U+0336 after every character, including spaces, so adjacent strokes join into a continuous line across whole words. Line breaks are left unmarked. Because the strokes are part of the text stream rather than styling, no platform can strip them the way rich-text formatting gets stripped — but each visible character now costs two characters against any length limit.
Strikethrough normally lives in the formatting layer: a word processor draws a line over your text but the underlying characters stay plain, and the line vanishes the moment you paste into a plain-text field. This generator takes a different route using combining characters — a special Unicode category of marks that attach to whatever character precedes them. After every letter you type, the tool inserts U+0336, the combining long stroke overlay, which renders as a horizontal line drawn through its host character. Consecutive strokes visually connect into one continuous line through the whole word. Because the strokes are characters in the text itself, the crossed-out effect survives everywhere plain text goes: X posts, Instagram bios, Discord names, YouTube comments, text messages.
The classic use is rhetorical: crossing out one word to comically 'hide' your real thought — 'had a p̶r̶o̶d̶u̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ long day' — a device that predates the web in edited manuscripts and works because readers see both the strike and the word beneath it. It is also used for showing corrections honestly rather than silently editing, marking done items in plain-text to-do lists, styling 'sold out' or 'old price' in marketplace bios, and general edgy aesthetics in usernames. Since strikethrough preserves your original letters underneath, it stays more readable than most fancy styles — the words are still your words, just visibly negated.
The mechanics come with quirks. How cleanly the line sits varies by font: some render one crisp continuous stroke, others draw slightly offset dashes per character, and a rare few place the line too high or low. The struck text is technically your original characters plus extra marks, which cuts both ways — search sometimes still matches the underlying word (unlike other fancy styles), but character counts double, which matters in length-limited fields like X posts. Screen readers handle U+0336 unpredictably: many ignore the marks and read the text normally (which may actually be wrong, since you meant the words as crossed out), while others announce clutter. And apps that support native strikethrough — Discord's ~~tildes~~, WhatsApp's ~tildes~ — render cleaner and more accessibly, so prefer those where they work.
Those apps apply formatting when you wrap text in ~~tildes~~ — clean, accessible, but only working inside that app's messages. This tool embeds combining stroke characters into the text itself, so the effect survives in usernames, bios, and platforms with no formatting support at all. Where native strikethrough exists, prefer it; where it does not, this is the way.
Rendering U+0336 is up to each font. Good fonts draw strokes that connect seamlessly into one line; others draw a separate dash per character with tiny gaps, and a few misplace the line vertically. You cannot control which font your readers see, so expect the effect to range from crisp to slightly ragged across devices.
Yes, double. Every visible letter carries an invisible companion stroke character, so a 20-letter struck phrase consumes roughly 40 characters of an X post's 280. This is the main practical cost of the combining-character approach — keep struck passages short in length-limited fields.
Sometimes — and this is unique among fancy styles. Your original letters remain in the text with strokes interleaved, so some search implementations that normalize combining marks will still match the underlying word. Deleting also behaves oddly: backspacing may remove the stroke first, then the letter, depending on the app.
Inconsistently, and the failure is interesting: most ignore combining overlays and read your words as if nothing were crossed out — which inverts your meaning if the strike was the point. Others announce the marks as noise. If the crossed-out reading matters, say it in words too ('scratch that'), so no listener misses the joke or the correction.