How to Cross Out Text Online (Instagram, Discord, WhatsApp)

Crossing out text is easy in a word processor and surprisingly hard everywhere else. Instagram, WhatsApp status, YouTube comments, most forums and half the note apps on your phone have no strikethrough button at all. The workaround is Unicode: instead of applying formatting, you replace each character with the same character plus a combining stroke, so the line is part of the text itself.

The quick method

Paste your sentence into the Strikethrough Text Generator, copy the first result, and paste it wherever you need it. Because the output is plain text, it survives copy-paste into any app that accepts typing.

How it actually works

The character U+0336, "combining long stroke overlay", attaches to the character before it. So a followed by U+0336 renders as a crossed-out a. Repeat for each letter and the whole string looks struck through. Two related characters give different looks: U+0335 is a shorter stroke that suits narrow fonts, and U+0338 is a diagonal slash that reads as "cancelled" rather than "deleted".

Where to use it — and where not to

• Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, LinkedIn: Unicode is the only option. Paste and go.
• Discord: use ~~text~~ inside messages — it renders natively and stays searchable. Use Unicode only for names and About Me.
• Slack: use ~text~.
• Google Docs, Word, Notion: use the built-in strikethrough command (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+X in Docs). Native formatting is searchable and accessible; Unicode is not.

Two catches worth knowing

First, every stroke is its own character, so crossed-out text uses roughly twice the character count. A 140-character message can silently exceed a 280-character limit. Second, screen readers pronounce combining marks poorly, so never put essential information in crossed-out Unicode text.

Removing strikethrough

There is no toggle — the stroke is part of the string. Retype the text, or paste it into a plain-text editor that strips combining marks.