Strikethrough Text Generator

A line that is part of the text, not formatting on top of it

Strikethrough in a word processor or on a web page is formatting: the letters are ordinary and the program draws a line over them. Paste them into an Instagram bio or an X post and the formatting is gone, because a plain text field only keeps characters.

Unicode has a way around that. A combining mark is a character with no shape of its own that the font draws on top of the character before it, which is how an accent can sit on any letter. U+0336 is a combining mark shaped like a horizontal stroke. Put one after every letter and the word looks crossed out, and since the stroke is now part of the text, it survives any paste.

Why every letter is not quite one character

The mark has to go after each thing you see as one character, and that is not always one code point. An accented letter can be a plain e plus a separate accent. A thumbs up with a skin tone is two code points, a family emoji is several people glued together with invisible joiners, and a flag is two regional letters. A mark pushed between those parts splits the skin tone off, breaks the family into separate people or turns the flag into two letters.

This page splits text with Intl.Segmenter, the browser’s implementation of the Unicode rules for user perceived characters, and adds the mark after each whole character. Emoji are then left unmarked, because the stroke comes from the text font and the emoji from a colour emoji font, and the two rarely line up. Line breaks are never marked, and spaces are marked only while the checkbox is on.

Which of the five lines to use

• Strikethrough(U+0336, long stroke overlay): the closest match to a word processor’s strikethrough. Use it for an old price, a joke correction or a finished item on a list.
• Short stroke (U+0335, short stroke overlay): a narrower bar through the middle of each letter, with gaps between. Lighter, and it can look tidier in narrow fonts where the long stroke overhangs.
• Slash (U+0338, long solidus overlay): a diagonal through each character, the same mark that turns an equals sign into not equal. Reads as no or not allowed rather than deleted.
• Underline (U+0332, low line): a line under each letter that joins into one when spaces are marked too.
• Double underline (U+0333, double low line): two lines, the look of a total at the bottom of a column of figures.

How to cross out words in a bio, caption or post

1. Type only the words that should be crossed out, not the whole caption. A struck word next to a normal one is what makes the joke or the price cut readable.
2. Pick a row. Leave Mark the spaces too on for one continuous line, or turn it off to strike each word separately.
3. Press Copy, then paste into the app and type the rest of the text around it.
4. Check the preview in the app on your phone before saving. The line is drawn by the font on the reader’s device, so it can look different there from how it looks here.

How to remove strikethrough from text you copied

1. Paste the crossed out text into the box.
2. The five marks are removed before anything else runs, and a Plain text row appears at the bottom of the list.
3. Copy that row. Accents that belong to the words are not among the five, so they stay where they were.

Pasting it without losing the line

• Copy button: each row copies its own version. On a phone you can also long press the preview and choose Copy.
• If copying fails: the in-app browsers inside social apps sometimes block the clipboard, and a warning says so. Open this page in Safari or Chrome and copy again.
• Character limits: every marked letter carries one more character. The status line under the box shows the new length before you paste into a bio with a limit.
• Do not retype or autocorrect it: editing a marked word in the app can leave a stray mark on the next letter. Fix the text here and paste it again.
• Nothing is in the address bar, so sharing the link shares the tool, not your text.

Apps with real strikethrough, and where the marks look wrong

Where an app has its own strikethrough, use it. It is real formatting, it can be undone, and screen readers handle it better:

• Discord and Reddit: ~~text~~. Discord also underlines __text__.
• WhatsApp and Slack: a single tilde each side, ~text~.
• Telegram: select the text and pick strikethrough from the formatting options.
• Markdown: ~~text~~ in GitHub flavoured Markdown; try it in the Markdown editor.
• Google Docs: Alt+Shift+5 on Windows, Cmd+Shift+X on a Mac. Excel: Ctrl+5. Word: the strikethrough button in the Font group of the Home tab.
• HTML: <s> for text that is no longer accurate, <del> for a removal from a document.

Instagram bios and captions, X posts and names, TikTok bios and most profile fields have no formatting at all. That is where the Unicode marks earn their keep.

Where the marks render badly

• Fonts without the mark show it on its own, often as a dotted circle or an empty box after each letter. Older operating systems and apps that bring their own small font are the likeliest places to see it.
• Letters of different widths: the stroke is drawn once per letter at roughly one width, so it can overhang an i and fall short of a W, leaving gaps or bumps in the line.
• Wide characters: Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are wider than Latin letters, and the stroke may cover only part of each one.
• Monospaced and terminal fonts sometimes draw the mark in its own cell, shifting everything after it.
• Normalisation: an equals sign with the slash mark counts, in Unicode’s eyes, as the same text as the not equal sign, and an app that normalises text may swap one for the other. It looks the same, but the character count drops by one.

What it does to screen readers, search and limits

• Screen readers do not hear a crossed out word. To assistive technology the word is now letters interleaved with marks. At the time of writing, what happens depends on the reader, the voice and the punctuation settings: some read the mark’s name after every letter, some spell the word out, and some drop the marks and read the word normally, so the listener misses the point. If the strike carries meaning, say it in words as well.
• Search and hashtags stop matching. A struck word is a different string from the plain word, so it will not match a search for it, and a hashtag may stop at the first mark or not be recognised at all.
• Length limits fill twice as fast. A 150 character bio holds roughly 75 marked characters.
• Some apps strip or limit combining marks, especially in usernames, because the same trick stacked dozens deep is used to make text spill over the lines around it. One mark per letter is usually allowed, but not everywhere.
• It cannot be turned off the way formatting can. To undo it, paste the text back here and copy the Plain text row.