How the line gets drawn
Strikethrough here does not use formatting at all. After every non-space character the generator inserts U+0336, a combining long stroke overlay. When the renderer draws a letter it also draws the mark on top of it, which reads as a line through the word.
Underline and double underline work the same way with different marks. Because the mark is a separate character, deleting one “letter” of struck text usually takes two backspaces, and copying the text copies the marks with it.
Where it works and where it is silently removed
Apps that render combining marks faithfully — most chat, most bios, most captions — show a clean line. Apps that normalise text or use a limited font pipeline drop the marks, and you get plain text with no indication anything was meant.
- Reliable: Discord messages, Telegram, most Android and iOS chat, plain HTML.
- Usually reliable: Instagram and TikTok captions and comments.
- Unreliable: fields that validate or normalise input, many email subjects, some CMS editors.
The character-budget trap
Struck text is roughly twice as long as plain text. A caption limit or a 150-character bio counts those marks, so a struck sentence can fill a field that looks half empty. On platforms that count bytes rather than characters the cost is worse.
Keep struck phrases short: a price, a word, a date. A whole paragraph in strike-through is unreadable and burns the limit.
When a strike line backfires
Strikethrough implies a correction — old price, previous plan, something withdrawn. That works when the joke or the offer is obvious. On a bio or a professional profile it usually reads as a mistake someone forgot to delete, and a screen reader simply reads the words as if the mark were not there, which loses the entire point.
One more practical note: never use strikethrough to hide a legal exclusion or a condition. It is visual only, and assistive technology and text extraction see right through it.
Questions people ask about strikethrough text generator
Is this real strikethrough formatting?
No. It is a combining Unicode mark placed after each character, so the line travels with the text without any formatting support.
Why did the strikethrough disappear after pasting?
The app normalised the text or its font pipeline dropped the combining marks. Nothing can force a field to keep them.
Does strikethrough text count double?
It counts every combining mark as a character, so a struck phrase uses roughly twice the budget of the same phrase unstruck.
Can I use it in a username or hashtag?
No. Both are matched as strings, and the marks make the text a different string that no one will search for.
Do screen readers announce strikethrough?
Generally not. They read the words as normal text, so a correction or a joke conveyed only by the line is lost.
Related tools
- The 32 text styles, explained — What each style actually is, which unicode range it comes from, and the one place it usually fails
- Bold text generator — Three separate bold alphabets, side by side
- Small caps generator — Type in lowercase, get small capitals out
- Fonts for WhatsApp — Whatsapp is the one app where you usually do not need this tool — its own formatting shortcuts are better, and they are free
- All 32 text styles — the full generator, bio ideas and hashtag sets on one page.