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These use real Unicode characters (not fonts), so they paste as styled text almost anywhere - Instagram bios, Discord, Twitter/X. Support varies slightly by app; test before relying on it somewhere important.
How do you cross out text where strikethrough isn't available?
Place the combining character U+0336, COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY, after each character you want struck. The mark draws a horizontal line through the character before it, so w̶o̶r̶d̶ is four letters plus four marks. Digits and punctuation get the stroke too; spaces are skipped, so the line breaks between words.
Strikethrough example: an old price
A price change typed in plain text, then struck through as a whole:
| Typed | Was $40, now half price! |
|---|---|
| Strikethrough | W̶a̶s̶ $̶4̶0̶,̶ n̶o̶w̶ h̶a̶l̶f̶ p̶r̶i̶c̶e̶!̶ |
Every character, including the dollar sign, the comma and the exclamation mark, receives a U+0336 mark, while the spaces stay unmarked. To strike only the old price, convert just "$40" and type the rest normally beside it.
How a combining stroke works
U+0336 belongs to the Combining Diacritical Marks block (U+0300-U+036F), the same family as the acute accent that can sit on an e. A combining mark has no width of its own; it attaches to the character before it, and the font positions it. The generator therefore inserts one U+0336 after every character except the space, which makes a struck word twice as long in code points as the plain word.
Because the mark is drawn character by character, the stroke is really a chain of short segments. In many fonts they meet cleanly; in others you may see small gaps, overlaps or a slightly different height on capitals and digits. Related marks exist, such as U+0335 COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY for a shorter bar and U+0338 COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY for a diagonal slash, but the generator uses the long horizontal stroke.
Corrections, jokes and old prices
Strikethrough signals that something was said and then withdrawn. Typical uses are a joke that pretends to retract a word, a finished item in a plain-text to-do list, an outdated detail left visible for honesty, or an old price shown next to a new one.
In a chat app with its own formatting, the built-in strikethrough (often ~~text~~ in Markdown-style syntax) is usually the better option: the letters stay ordinary, so the message remains searchable and the formatting can be exposed to assistive technology. Unicode strikethrough is the fallback for profile fields, comments and titles where no formatting exists.
The silent strike: screen readers and search
The crossed-out meaning does not reach listeners. Screen readers read the base characters and either pass over the combining marks or announce them as symbols, so "was $40, now $25" with the first price struck may be heard as two prices with nothing to say which one was withdrawn. Never use Unicode strikethrough alone to convey that information.
Search is affected too. To most software a struck word is a different sequence of code points, so a search for the plain word may not find it, and normalization does not help: NFKC leaves combining strokes in place. Character limits fill up quickly as well, since a field that counts code points or UTF-16 units charges two for every struck character.
Strikethrough characters at a glance
| Characters come from | Combining Diacritical Marks: U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY after each non-space character |
|---|---|
| Capital A becomes | A̶ (U+0041 U+0336) |
| Small a becomes | a̶ (U+0061 U+0336) |
| Digits 0-9 | 0̶ 1̶ 2̶ 3̶ 4̶ 5̶ 6̶ 7̶ 8̶ 9̶ |
| Punctuation | All marked, e.g. ! becomes !̶ |
| Basic letters left as typed | None |
| UTF-16 units per letter | 2 (the letter plus a combining mark) |
Strikethrough tips
- Convert only the words you want struck, then paste them next to plain text.
- If the strike carries meaning, say it in words too, as in "was $40, now $25".
- Use the app's own strikethrough formatting wherever it exists.
Strikethrough text FAQ
The generator skips spaces, so no stroke mark is attached to them and the line stops at the end of each word. That keeps word boundaries visible; a stroke across the gaps would need marks attached to the spaces themselves.
The mark is added after digits, punctuation and emoji as well as letters. Digits and punctuation usually show the stroke clearly, but how a stroke over an emoji looks varies a lot between apps, and it may not appear at all.
In fields that count code points or UTF-16 units, yes: each struck character is the original plus U+0336. Fields that count user-perceived characters (grapheme clusters) treat a letter and its mark as one.
Yes. Deleting every U+0336 character restores the original text, since the base letters are never changed. A find-and-replace that supports Unicode escapes, or a short script, can strip the marks in one step.
Related text styles
- Underline Text Generator: the same combining technique, with U+0332 under the letters
- Bold Text Generator: emphasis rather than retraction
- Monospace Text Generator: a typewriter look for corrected notes
- Fancy Text Generator: all 15 styles side by side
Reviewed by Raja Jahangir · Last reviewed: October 7, 2026