What is a strikethrough text generator?
A strikethrough text generator adds a combining mark after every character you type. Type a and you get a̶ — the letter a, immediately followed by Combining Long Stroke Overlay (U+0336), an invisible character whose only job is to draw a line through whichever character precedes it. Two characters, rendered as one struck letter. Because both are ordinary text, the effect copies and pastes into any field that accepts text.
Why this works where Ctrl+Shift+X does not
The strikethrough button in Word, Google Docs or Slack applies formatting: your letters stay as they are and the app records a separate instruction to draw a line over them. Plain-text fields — an Instagram bio, a marketplace listing, a form input — have nowhere to store that instruction, so it vanishes on paste. Combining marks avoid the problem entirely by putting the line in the text as a character. Nothing needs to be stored separately because there is nothing separate.
Where strikethrough text gets used
The five line styles
Strikethrough (U+0336) is the standard full-width line and the one to use by default — it joins up between characters to form a continuous bar. Short Strike (U+0335) draws a shorter dash per character, giving a dotted-line effect with visible gaps. Slashed (U+0338) and Short Slash (U+0337) cross diagonally instead, the same mark used to negate mathematical symbols (≠), so they read as “cancelled” rather than “edited out”. Wavy (U+0334) draws a tilde through the character and looks glitchy — closer in spirit to the glitch styles than to a real strikethrough.
The one real advantage over fancy fonts
Every other style on this site works by swapping your letter for a different-looking character, which means coverage gaps: no bold comma, no cursive digits, nothing outside A–Z. Combining marks have no such limit. They layer on top of whatever character is already there — digits, punctuation, accented letters, other alphabets, even characters produced by the other tools here. That is why you can take 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 text from the bold generator and strike it: 𝗯̶𝗼̶𝗹̶𝗱̶. Spaces are the deliberate exception — leaving them unmarked keeps words readable instead of fusing them into one long bar.
Tips & tricks
- For prices and offers, strike the old number and leave the new one plain — the contrast is the whole message.
- If the line looks broken, switch from Short Strike to the full Strikethrough; U+0336 is designed to connect between characters.
- Struck text will not match a normal text search, so never strike something people need to find — a product name, a handle, a link.
- Character counts rise: every struck character is two characters. A 150-character bio limit holds about 75 struck characters.
FAQ
Word applies strikethrough as formatting — an instruction stored alongside your letters. Paste it into a plain-text field and the instruction is dropped, because that field stores characters only. This tool inserts a combining mark character after each letter instead, so the line is part of the text and travels with it into any bio, message or comment box.
Combining marks are drawn by whatever font renders your text, and fonts vary in how they position them. Monospace and system UI fonts usually give an unbroken line; some display fonts leave visible gaps between characters, and a few mobile apps offset the mark slightly. The characters are identical everywhere — only the drawing differs.
Numbers and punctuation, yes — this is the big advantage over styles that swap letters for look-alikes, which usually skip anything that is not A–Z. Spaces are deliberately left unmarked, so words stay visually separated instead of merging into one long bar. If you want the strike to run through the spaces too, add the mark manually between words.
It can. Each mark is an extra invisible character, so struck text does not match a plain search for the same word, and screen readers may read the marks out or stumble over them. Use it for visual effect on short phrases and keep anything that needs to be found or read aloud in normal text.
No. Everything runs in your browser through a local character map. Nothing is sent to a server, no advertising cookies are set, and closing the tab clears it all.