Free Strikethrough Text Generator – Crossed-Out Text

What Strikethrough Text Is and How the Overlay Characters Work

This draws a line through your text so it looks crossed out, and it does so in a way that survives copy and paste into apps with no formatting options. That is the whole appeal. Twitter, Instagram, Discord bios, marketplace listings and comment boxes give you plain text and nothing else, yet people want to show a price that has been reduced, a joke correction, a task marked done, or a word retracted for comic effect. Word processors handle strikethrough with a formatting button; a social caption box cannot, so the effect has to be carried by the characters themselves. The technique uses combining characters. Unicode includes marks that are designed to attach to whatever character precedes them rather than occupy their own space, and one of them is the combining long stroke overlay at U+0336. The generator walks your string and inserts that mark after every visible character, so the renderer draws each letter with a horizontal line through it. A related mark, the combining short stroke overlay at U+0335, produces a shorter dash for a lighter effect. Because the strike is a real character rather than styling, the appearance travels with the text. It also means your string is roughly twice as long as it looks: each visible letter now carries a companion codepoint. A worked example. Type the price ₹1,499. The generator inserts U+0336 after each of the six visible characters, producing ₹̶1̶,̶4̶9̶9̶ — a struck-through price ready to sit beside the new one in a listing. Count the codepoints and there are twelve where you see six, which matters if the field has a character limit. Now try a word: done becomes d̶o̶n̶e̶, four visible letters carried by eight codepoints. Paste either into a caption and the line renders on any modern phone. Where it earns its place. A seller on a resale marketplace shows the original price struck through next to the discounted one, which no listing form lets you format. A community manager corrects a mistake in a pinned post by striking the wrong date rather than deleting the sentence, so the history stays honest. A copywriter uses a struck word for a deliberate joke — the reader sees both the rejected word and the replacement. Someone maintaining a public to-do thread strikes finished items instead of removing them. A Discord user marks an expired event in a channel description so members can see what has already passed. A freelancer updating a portfolio caption strikes an old day rate beside the new one, which reads as transparent rather than as a quiet increase. A fantasy league organiser strikes eliminated team names in a group chat pinned message instead of editing them out and losing the record. Use it on a few words rather than a whole paragraph, because a long struck passage becomes genuinely hard to read on a phone screen and defeats the point of writing it. Three limitations are worth knowing before you rely on it. Rendering varies: some older Android builds, certain desktop fonts and a few apps draw the overlay slightly offset or not at all, so preview on the actual platform. Screen readers usually ignore the combining mark entirely, which means a visually impaired reader hears the old price as if it were current — never strike through information where the correction is the point without also saying so in words. And because each character doubles, a struck line can silently blow past a character limit that plain text would have fitted, which is a frustrating way to lose a caption you had already finished writing. Generation runs in your browser, so nothing you type is uploaded, stored or logged.

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