Strikethrough without formatting
Most social apps and many chat tools don’t offer strikethrough or underline. Unicode has combining characters that draw a line through, under or over the character before them. Adding one after every character produces text like S̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶ that survives copy and paste anywhere.
Effects available: strikethrough (U+0336), short stroke (U+0335), slash (U+0338), underline (U+0332), double underline (U+0333), overline (U+0305), dotted underline (U+0324), tilde overlay (U+0334) and cross below (U+0353). Include spaces draws a continuous line across words.
Things to know
- Rendering depends on the font: some draw neat continuous lines, others leave small gaps.
- Every character gains an extra code point, so the text counts as roughly twice as long toward character limits.
- Screen readers usually ignore the marks, so the meaning (for example, a crossed-out old price) may be lost (say it in words too).
- Remove the effect with the Unicode Normalizer or Remove Accents tool.
Worked example
Here is what the Strikethrough & Underline Text returns for its built-in example. Settings used: Effect: Strikethrough; Include spaces: on. Click Try an example in the tool above to load it, then change it as you like.
This price is goneT̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶g̶o̶n̶e̶Questions
How do I cross out text on Instagram or X?
Type it here with Strikethrough selected, then copy and paste the result. It uses Unicode combining characters, so no formatting is needed.
Why is my strikethrough text twice as long?
Each visible character is followed by a combining strike character, so the character count roughly doubles.
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