Strikethrough Text Generator

What this tool does

The Strikethrough Text Generator takes your plain text and adds a Unicode combining mark to each character, producing two styled variants: a strikethrough version with a horizontal line through the middle of every letter, and a slashed version with a shorter diagonal stroke. Both results update live as you type, and each has its own copy button so you can grab whichever style you need.

Because the effect is created using real Unicode combining characters rather than HTML formatting or CSS, the result pastes as ordinary text in any app that renders Unicode. You can drop it into an Instagram bio, a Tweet, a Discord message, a LinkedIn post, or a Word document, and the strike or slash marks come with it.

Why you might need it

Strikethrough text is a common visual shorthand for “this is no longer valid” or “I am crossing this out”. It is used in revision notes, editorial annotations, and humorous social media posts where the author writes something and then strikes it through — usually for comic or rhetorical effect. Unlike an HTML <del> tag or a rich-text editor’s strikethrough button, Unicode combining-mark strikethrough works in plain-text fields, chat apps, and social media bio boxes that do not support any formatting at all.

The slashed variant gives a slightly different look and is useful when you want the crossed-out effect to feel a bit different — a slant rather than a flat line. Some designers prefer it for a more handwritten aesthetic.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the Your text box.
2. Two styled results appear below in real time: Strikethrough and Slashed.
3. Click the Copy button next to whichever style you want.
4. Paste the result anywhere you like — social bios, messages, documents.
5. Use Load sample to see an example with a realistic phrase.
6. Click Clear to empty the input and start over.

Common pitfalls

The combining marks attach to characters, so every letter has its own individual mark. This is different from a single long horizontal rule drawn over a word; instead, each character has its own overlay, which means the strike line may not appear perfectly continuous across the word depending on the font. On most modern system fonts the result looks like a solid line, but on some decorative or pixel fonts there may be small gaps between letters.

Spaces are left without marks intentionally. Adding a combining mark to a space would attach the mark to the preceding character’s glyph in some renderers, and to nothing at all in others, producing unpredictable spacing. The current behaviour — skipping spaces and newlines — gives the cleanest result across different platforms.

Copy the text before pasting it into your target app, rather than copying from the preview inside the tool. The preview box is not editable, so copying from it directly should work fine, but using the Copy button ensures you have the clean combining-mark text without any extra whitespace.

Tips and advanced use

Use strikethrough for ironic commentary in social posts: write something provocative and then strike it through with a correction, a classic format in online humour. The slashed variant works well when you want the “error” or “redacted” aesthetic — it feels more like a typographic correction mark than a deletion.

For longer pieces of text such as paragraphs, the strikethrough is still applied character by character, so the entire block comes through correctly. Paste an entire paragraph, copy the result, and paste it into your post as one unit.

If you need other decorative text effects — bold, italic, bubble letters, small caps, upside-down — the Fancy Text Generator offers all of them in one place. The Underline Text Generator is the companion tool for the underline combining mark, also linked in the related tools section.