Strikethrough Text Generator
A strikethrough here is a combining character drawn on top of each letter. It copies as text, so it works where formatting menus do not.
Three lines, three characters
The effect is made with combining characters: marks that attach to the character in front of them instead of taking a space of their own. A plain letter is one code point; a letter with a line through it is two — the letter, then the mark.
| Effect | Hello | Mark | Code point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strikethrough | H̶e̶l̶l̶o̶ | Combining long stroke overlay | U+0336 |
| Underline | H̲e̲l̲l̲o̲ | Combining low line | U+0332 |
| Slashed | H̸e̸l̸l̸o̸ | Combining long solidus overlay | U+0338 |
Because the mark comes after its letter, the string reads "H, overlay, e, overlay" and so on. Delete the letter and the mark stays behind, drawn over whatever precedes it — that is why editing this text by hand in the middle of a word tends to leave stray lines.
When to use it
- Prices. $̶4̶9̶ next to the new price, on a poster or a story where there is no rich text.
- Corrections. Crossing out a wrong time or date instead of deleting it keeps the correction visible.
- To-do lists in chat. A message you have already handled, marked as done.
- Underline for emphasis where bold is already used for something else. It is the least common of the three and the least supported.
Where it fails
- Fields that strip combining marks. Usernames, some comment boxes and most form validation will drop the overlay, leaving plain letters. Nothing is corrupted; the field removed it.
- Character limits. The text is twice as long in code points. A 150-character caption limit fits 75 crossed-out letters, not 150.
- Line breaks. A mark at the end of a line or before a newline can render on the wrong line or disappear. Keep crossed-out runs on one line.
- Games and terminals. Fixed-width displays often have no glyph for the overlay, so it appears as a box after each letter.
- Accessibility. Screen readers may read the overlay as a separate symbol, announce "combining long stroke overlay" for every letter, or skip it entirely. A crossed-out price read aloud may not sound crossed out at all.
If the app has its own syntax, use it. Discord, Reddit, GitHub, Slack and several chat apps treat ~~text~~ as strikethrough, and the result is real formatting: one code point per letter, readable by assistive technology, and removable by the reader. The combining-character trick exists for the fields where that syntax does nothing.
Typing it by hand
You do not need this page for a single word if you can copy the mark itself. The mark is U+0336, and it is invisible until it sits after a letter: H + U+0336 renders as H̶. Put the cursor after a letter, paste the mark, repeat. That is the whole trick — a "strikethrough font" is one small character repeated after every letter.
The three marks can be stacked. A letter with both U+0336 and U+0332 renders with a line through and under it in most fonts; the result is rarely worth the readability cost, and stacking more than two marks usually turns into a dark blob.
Questions
Is this a font I can download?
No. The output is text with extra characters. A real strikethrough in a document is formatting, which is lost when copied into plain text; this survives because it is part of the characters.
Why does only some of my text get crossed out?
Marks attach to the character before them. If a letter was typed after the paste, or the field normalised part of the string, the alignment shifts and the lines land in the wrong place. Regenerate the whole run instead of patching it.
Does strikethrough text still get indexed by search engines?
The characters are indexed as they are, with the overlays attached. A search for the plain word will not match the crossed-out version, and the crossed-out version will not be recognised as "the same word, struck through".