Strikethrough & Underline Text

There is no strikethrough font. A strikethrough generator takes your word and types one extra character after every letter: the Combining Long Stroke Overlay ̶, U+0336. On its own it looks like nothing, or like a dotted circle with a line through it, because a combining mark has no body of its own: it is drawn on top of whatever character comes just before it. Type s, then the mark, then t, then the mark, and you get s̶t̶. That is why the marks on this page look empty in the grid and why every example in the combos is a finished word you can copy whole.

The family has several strokes. The long stroke ̶ is wide enough to run into its neighbours, so a word reads as one continuous line: s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶. The short stroke ̵ (U+0335) stays inside each letter, which gives a lighter, broken look: s̵t̵r̵i̵k̵e̵t̵h̵r̵o̵u̵g̵h̵. The long solidus ̸ (U+0338) and short solidus ̷ (U+0337) cross each letter with a slash, w̸r̸o̸n̸g̸ and w̷r̷o̷n̷g̷; the reverse solidus ⃥ (U+20E5) slashes the other way and the long double solidus ⃫ (U+20EB) doubles it. The tilde overlay ̴ (U+0334) is the wavy strike, w̴a̴v̴y̴, which is how generators make 'squiggly' or 'wave' text.

The rest of the overlays come from the Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols block, made for mathematics and technical notation but happy on any letter: the long and short vertical line ⃒ ⃓, the double vertical stroke ⃦, the leftwards arrow overlay ⃪, and three rings, plain ⃘, clockwise ⃙ and anticlockwise ⃚. The parentheses overlay ᪾ (U+1ABE, Unicode 7.0, 2014) draws brackets round the middle of a letter, and the deletion mark ᷻ (U+1DFB, Unicode 9.0, 2016) is the scholar's strikethrough: the dotted mark medieval scribes put over letters they wanted cancelled, encoded so that editors of manuscripts can record it.

Underline text and overline text without any formatting

Underlining works the same way. The Combining Low Line ̲ (U+0332) draws a line under the letter before it, and the Combining Double Low Line ̳ (U+0333) draws two: u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲ and d̳o̳u̳b̳l̳e̳. The macron below ̱ (U+0331) is a shorter underline that leaves gaps between letters, the minus sign below ̠ shorter still, the equals sign below ͇ a short double line, the tilde below ̰ a wavy underline, w̰a̰v̰y̰, and the triple underdot ⃨ a dotted one. Because the underline is part of the text, it survives in Instagram and TikTok bios, X posts, YouTube comments, Discord names and anywhere else that offers no Ctrl + U.

Above the letter the matching marks are the Combining Overline ̅ (U+0305), the shorter macron ̄ (U+0304), the double overline ̿ (U+033F) and the tilde ̃ for a wavy line: o̅v̅e̅r̅l̅i̅n̅e̅, d̿o̿u̿b̿l̿e̿. The annuity symbol ⃧ is an overline with a small tick at its right end, used in actuarial formulas. Overlines have real jobs in maths and science, which is why the Combining Overline exists at all: the bar over a repeating decimal (0.3̅), the x-bar for a mean (x̄), the bar for a set complement (A̅) or for a negated variable in logic.

Some lines are meant to run across two letters at once. The double macron ͞ and double macron below ͟ sit between a pair of letters and bridge them, the double tilde ͠ does the same with a wave, and the conjoining macron ︦ and conjoining macron below ︭ with their left half and right half marks ︤ ︥ ︫ ︬ let a font draw one unbroken line over or under a whole run of letters. They were added for linguists and editors of old texts, and many fonts still draw them badly, so test before you rely on one.

When you want a line and not a marked letter, use the spacing characters in the last group: the underscore _, the double low line ‗, the fullwidth ＿ that makes a long solid blank in East Asian text, the dashed, centreline and wavy low lines ﹍ ﹎ ﹏, and their overline twins ‾ ¯ ￣ ﹉ ﹊ ﹋ ﹌. These are the lines for a fill-in-the-blank, a signature line or a divider; more of them, with the dashes, are in Dash & Hyphen Symbols and Bullet Point & Divider Symbols.

Where strikethrough works: Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, Word and the rest

Several apps have their own strikethrough and need no special characters. On Discord wrap a word in two tildes, ~~like this~~, and in two underscores, __like this__, to underline it. On WhatsApp a single tilde on each side, ~like this~, crosses the text out, but WhatsApp has no underline at all, which is why 'underline text in WhatsApp' is such a common search: the only way is the combining low line, l̲i̲k̲e̲ ̲t̲h̲i̲s̲. Telegram offers both in the menu that appears when you select text, Slack uses single tildes, and Reddit, GitHub and most other Markdown editors use the double tilde. In Minecraft Java Edition the formatting codes §m and §n give strikethrough and underline in signs and server messages.

In office software the formatting is built in. Excel strikes a cell with Ctrl + 5. Google Docs uses Alt + Shift + 5 on Windows and Cmd + Shift + X on a Mac, and Word for Mac uses Cmd + Shift + X too; Word for Windows has no default shortcut, so press Alt, then H, then 4, or open the Font dialog with Ctrl + D and tick Strikethrough or Double strikethrough. Outlook follows Word. Underline is Ctrl + U (Cmd + U) almost everywhere. For a web page use the <s>, <del> and <u> tags or CSS text-decoration; in LaTeX \underline{} and \overline{} are built in and \sout{} comes from the ulem package.

The combining marks are for everywhere else: Instagram and TikTok bios, captions and comments, X posts, Facebook posts, YouTube comments, Twitch and Steam names, SMS, file names, and any form that takes plain text. Three limits apply. Usernames and handles (the part after @) accept only plain letters, digits, dots and underscores, so crossed-out text goes in the display name or bio, never the handle. A hashtag or a search stops at the first mark, so s̶a̶l̶e̶ is not found by anyone searching for 'sale'. And a text message with even one combining mark switches from the 160-character GSM alphabet to Unicode, which cuts an SMS segment to 70 characters.

Circles, squares and prohibition signs around a letter

Seven marks draw a shape around the character before them instead of a line through it: the enclosing circle ⃝ (U+20DD), square ⃞, diamond ⃟, the circle backslash ⃠ that makes a no-sign out of anything, the upward triangle ⃤ for warning signs, the screen ⃢ for a letter shown on a display, and the enclosing keycap ⃣. The keycap is the one you see every day without knowing it: the emoji 1️⃣ 2️⃣ #️⃣ *️⃣ are not single characters but a digit, the emoji variation selector and U+20E3, three characters that the font draws as one key.

Outside the keycap emoji, support is the weakest on this page. Some fonts draw A⃝ neatly, others put the circle beside the letter or drop it, and phones differ from desktops. If you need a letter in a circle or a square that renders everywhere, the precomposed characters Ⓐ ⓐ ① and 🅰 🄰 are the safe choice; they have their own pages in Circled Letters & Numbers (Bubble Letters) and Squared Letters & Symbols (Box Letters), and the Letter Emoji & Alphabet Symbols collection has every alphabet style in one place.

Typing, maths and what a screen reader hears

To type a mark yourself, type the letter first and the mark second; the usual mistake is to do it the other way round, which puts the line on the space before the word. In Word type the letter, then the hex code 0336 and press Alt + X, and the code turns into the mark on that letter; 0332 gives the underline, 0305 the overline. On a Linux desktop press Ctrl + Shift + U, type 336 and press space. There is no quick way on a phone, so copy the marked word from the combos here, or copy a bare mark and paste it after each letter. Unicode has had these marks since version 1.0 in 1991, so they display on practically every device, even when the font places them a little high or low.

In mathematics the slash is not decoration but negation. The not-equal sign ≠ is defined in Unicode as = followed by U+0338, and ∉ and ≮ are ∈ and < with the same slash; a program that normalizes text will split them into those two characters. Overlines mark repetition and averages, as above, and the ring and arrow overlays come from the same technical block. Our Math Symbols collection has the precomposed signs.

Be honest with yourself about who can read this. Screen readers such as VoiceOver and NVDA generally announce the base letters and skip the overlays, so n̶o̶t̶ ̶a̶v̶a̶i̶l̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ is heard as 'not available' with no hint that it is crossed out; a few engines spell out 'combining long stroke overlay' after every letter instead, which is worse. Marked text also defeats spell-checkers and search. Use it for a visual joke, a struck-out price or an emphasised word, and keep anything that matters in plain text next to it, or use the app's own formatting where it exists. Heavier stacks of these marks become Zalgo & Glitch Text Characters, and the accents that live in the same Unicode block are in Letters with Accents.