Glitch text guides
Most questions about glitch text are really questions about one specific platform eating it. These cover the ones people actually hit, plus how the whole thing works underneath.
Getting it to work on a platform
- Glitch text on Discord Why your username rejects it, your display name accepts it, and bots strip your nickname.
- Instagram and TikTok Working inside a 150-character bio and an 80-character one, and why bios filter harder than captions.
- Glitch text on Roblox What the text filter actually allows, and where Roblox creators use it instead.
- Minecraft glitch text The obfuscation code most people are really looking for, and when Unicode is the better answer.
When something goes wrong
Understanding the effect
- How glitch text works Combining marks, grapheme clusters and normalization, explained without a spec in hand.
- What is zalgo text? A 2004 forum joke, a creepypasta deity, and the years it could crash your phone.
- Animated glitch text Why pasted text cannot move, and copy-paste CSS for the version that can.
The three facts that answer most questions
If you read nothing else here, these cover the majority of what people write in about.
Every combining mark counts as a character. Platforms count characters, not letters. A six-letter word at high intensity can cost over a hundred, which is more than an entire 80-character TikTok bio. Almost every complaint about text being cut off traces back to this one fact.
Username fields and display name fields are different. Usernames run allowlists: Discord permits lowercase letters, numbers, underscores and periods, and Roblox permits letters, numbers and one underscore. No generator gets around an allowlist. Display names are the fields that accept Unicode.
Rendering is not guaranteed to match. The characters are identical everywhere, but iOS, Android, Windows and each app's own font engine stack them differently. Lower intensities look far more consistent across devices than high ones.
Start with the tool
If you just want output rather than an explanation, the glitch text generator is the main tool, and the symbol reference lists every combining mark it uses. The generator has a per-platform character counter built in, which prevents the most common problem before it happens.
For a specific look rather than a specific platform, there are dedicated pages for zalgo, cursed, creepy, corrupted and hacked text.