Strikethrough Text Generator

What Strikethrough Text Really Is

Crossed-out text looks like formatting, and that is the trap. When you press the strikethrough button in Word or Google Docs, you set a property on the text — and that property lives in the document, not in the characters. Copy the words into a plain text box and the line disappears. It cannot survive a paste.

The strikethrough this page generates is different in kind. It attaches a combining long stroke overlay — Unicode character U+0336 — to every letter. That character is a mark with zero width: it has no space of its own, it simply draws a horizontal stroke through whatever sits before it. Glue one to each letter and the strokes line up into a single continuous line, because the renderer places every mark at the same height.

Two consequences follow, and both matter. First, the result is real text — it pastes into a bio, a comment, a chat box, a spreadsheet, and the line travels with it, because the line is made of characters. Second, the base letters are still there underneath. Nothing was deleted; a reader who strips the marks gets the original word back, and that is exactly why strikethrough reads as "crossed out" rather than "erased".

It also explains the quirks. Because the mark attaches to the previous character, a string that starts with a strikethrough mark renders it on a dotted placeholder circle. Because the stroke is drawn by the font rather than by the app, its thickness varies slightly between devices — heavier on some Android system fonts, thinner on iOS. And because each letter carries its own mark, a crossed-out word is roughly twice as many characters as the plain word, which quietly matters on any platform with a character limit.

How To Use This Strikethrough Generator

1. Type your text in the box above. Every style updates as you type, so you can compare them side by side.
2. Pick a line. "Single Line" is the classic strikethrough. "Double Line" is heavier and reads as a formal deletion. "Slash" is a diagonal — the maths and legal convention for "not" or "disputed". "Underline" and "Overline" are the same trick pointed elsewhere.
3. Copy the version you want. What lands on your clipboard is characters, not an image and not a formatting flag.
4. Paste it wherever text goes: captions, comments, chat, product listings, documents.

Three practical tips from using this every day. Keep crossed-out strings short — two to four words, because a fully struck paragraph is unreadable and looks like a mistake. Put the plain replacement after the struck text, so the eye reads "old → new" in the natural order. And leave the spaces between words unstruck, which the generator does automatically; a line running through the gaps turns the whole phrase into one long bar.

If you want to cross out only part of a sentence, type the whole sentence, copy it, then edit the paste down to just the words you need crossed. Doing it in two passes is faster than fighting with per-word input.

Strikethrough, Underline, Slash: What Each Line Says

All four marks are the same mechanism pointed in different directions, and each carries a meaning readers pick up without being told:

• Strikethrough (U+0336) — deleted, corrected, no longer true. This is the mark of the edit: an old price, a wrong word, a plan that changed. In a chat it reads as self-correction and therefore as honesty.
• Slash (U+0337) — not, disputed, void. In mathematics a slash through a symbol means negation; in legal drafting a slashed clause is a rejected one. Socially it reads as sharper and more dismissive than a strike.
• Underline (U+0332) — in print this means a link or emphasis, but in plain text it has become a way to stress a word without bold, and on some platforms it reads as a heading.
• Overline (U+0305) — the rarest of the four. In logic it is negation, so an overlined word reads as a formal "not this", which is why it turns up in maths-adjacent humour.

Choosing between them is a tone decision, not a technical one. If you are correcting yourself, use a strike. If you are rejecting someone else's claim, use a slash. If you are emphasising, use an underline — but sparingly, because two underlined phrases in one sentence read as a ransom note.

Where Crossed-Out Text Works Best

• Prices and availability — the original price struck through, the new price beside it, is the single most effective use of the mark on the internet. It signals a discount without needing a banner.
• Self-correction in posts — "my favourite is t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ there" reads as a person thinking out loud, which is far more trustworthy than a silently edited comment.
• Task lists — in Notion, Obsidian and plain markdown notes, a struck line is the fastest way to show something is done without deleting the record of it.
• Chat humour — Discord and Slack both render combining marks, and a struck-out word in the middle of a sentence is a reliable joke delivery.
• Bios and listings — "s̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ restocking Friday" tells a customer everything in one line, and it survives being copied out of the app.

Want a whole profile that uses this well — a plain searchable name, a struck line in the bio, and the right length for each platform? Bio Studio previews the name and bio across seven platforms with live character counts.

Where It Breaks, And Why

• Character limits — each mark is a full code point, so a crossed word costs double. On a 30-character display name, twelve crossed letters already hit the ceiling.
• Search — search engines and in-app search match the base letters plus the marks, which almost nothing indexes. Crossed text is effectively unfindable, so never cross the words people would search for.
• Screen readers — combining marks are read as noise or skipped entirely. Anything that must be understood needs a plain-text twin.
• Strict input fields — a few game chat filters and older comment boxes strip combining marks on submit, so your struck text arrives as plain letters. That is validation, not a bug.
• Emoji collisions — put a strike next to a colourful emoji and some renderers draw the line over the emoji's face, which looks broken rather than intentional.

The rule of thumb: cross out decoration and status, never information someone needs to act on. A crossed price beside a real one is helpful; a crossed address is a support ticket waiting to happen.

A Short History Of The Struck Line

Crossing something out is older than printing. Medieval scribes struck through errors in manuscripts, and the practice became a formal part of proofreading: a struck word meant delete, a dotted underline meant "keep it after all" — the ancestor of the modern proofreader's stet. Accountants kept double-entry ledgers for centuries by drawing a line through a settled entry, which is where the "paid" slash and the crossed-out balance come from.

Print never used a struck line in body text, because a compositor would have had to overprint every letter — expensive and ugly. So strikethrough stayed a manuscript and legal mark for centuries: contracts were redlined by hand, and a struck clause meant a rejected one. That is why a crossed line still reads as editorial rather than decorative — we have been trained by five hundred years of corrections.

The typewriter changed the economics. With a typewriter you could strike a word after the fact, badly, and the mark became associated with cheap correction. Word processors then turned it into a checkbox, and by the late 1990s the strikethrough button had moved from "fixing a mistake" to "an effect I chose" — the same button now crosses out a joke on purpose.

Unicode, characteristically, encoded the mark for a different reason entirely. U+0336 belongs to the combining diacritics block, added for mathematical negation and for notations that need a stroke overlaying a symbol. Nobody at the time was thinking about sold-out product listings. The shopping use came later, when people realised the mark travelled with the text — and the web quietly reinvented a scribe's correction mark as a marketing device.

Which is a decent summary of the whole trick: a five-hundred-year-old editing convention, encoded for mathematics, now mostly used to make a discount look real.