Typecase

Strikethrough Text Generator

Draw a line through your words — or under them — in places that offer no formatting at all. Six variants, from a hairline stroke to a double underline.

0 chars
Strikethrough (long stroke)
Strikethrough (short stroke)
Slashed
Underline
Double underline
Tilde overlay

What this strikethrough generator does

It threads an invisible marker in behind every character you type, and that marker draws a line through — or under — the character in front of it. The six rows are six different markers, which is why the stroke length and position differ between them.

How it actually works

This tool works on a completely different principle from the alphabet-swapping generators elsewhere on this site. Nothing is substituted. Your letters stay exactly as you typed them, and a second character is inserted after each one.

That second character is a combining mark. Combining marks have no width of their own and are never displayed on their own; the text renderer's job is to draw them on top of whatever came immediately before. They are the mechanism behind accented letters in many languages — an e followed by a combining acute accent is displayed as é. The mark used here, combining long stroke overlay, simply happens to draw a horizontal line at mid-height instead of an accent above.

The practical consequence is that your text doubles in length while looking unchanged in size. A five-letter word becomes ten characters: five letters and five marks. The letter and its mark are treated by most software as a single unit on screen, which is why one press of backspace usually deletes both, but a character counter will report the true count of ten.

Where people use it

  • Shop and reseller bios, to show an old price crossed out beside a new one.
  • Discord and X posts for the joke where a word is struck out and corrected — useful in Discord display names and channel topics, where the usual double-tilde markdown does not apply.
  • Plain-text to-do lists in notes apps that have no checkbox feature.
  • Steam and gaming profiles, which accept the marks in most fields.
  • Spreadsheet cells, where you want one crossed-out row without applying cell formatting that a later sort or export would lose.

Questions about strikethrough text

Why does my character count double when I add a strikethrough?

Because each strike is a real character, not a formatting flag. Every letter gets an invisible combining mark inserted after it, so a twenty-character sentence becomes forty characters. On a platform with a strict limit, such as a bio field, crossing out text costs you half your remaining space.

Why does the line look broken or uneven in some apps?

The mark is drawn per character, so what looks like one continuous rule is really a row of short strokes lined up end to end. In fonts with wide letter spacing, or where the app adds extra tracking, small gaps appear between them. Fonts with tight spacing give a cleaner line.

What is the difference between the strikethrough and slashed rows?

They use different marks. The long stroke overlay draws a horizontal line across the full width of the character. The solidus overlay draws a diagonal slash instead, which reads more like "not allowed" than "deleted". The short stroke sits in the same place as the long one but does not extend to the character edges, so words look dashed rather than ruled.

Why does pressing backspace sometimes not delete the whole letter?

Different text fields disagree about whether a letter and its combining mark are one unit or two. Most modern apps delete the pair together. Some older editors and terminal inputs remove the mark first and the letter on a second press, which makes it look as though the strikethrough is peeling off.

Should I use this in Discord instead of the double tilde?

Not in ordinary messages. Discord has real strikethrough markdown, which is cleaner, does not inflate your character count and can be removed by editing. Use this tool for the places Discord markdown does not reach, such as display names, channel topics and server descriptions.

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