You may have found this page after seeing someone post glitchy text (ļ̵͝i̴͋ͅk̵̡̚e̵̝̎ ̷̡́ẗ̸̠h̵͚̊i̸͈̐s̴̬̚) in the comments of a blog post, youtube comment, or other social media page. And now that you're able to genertate your own creepy ("zalgo") text using the above translator, you're probably wondering: How is text converted into weird glitch text like this?

Well, the story starts with Unicode. Unicode is an industry standard that manages all of the characters that you view on most of your electronic devices. Unicode contains certain special characters called "combining character". Rather than being their own individual letters, these characters are added to other letters and symbols. The result: we can add weird glitchy marks to your text.

In the study of written language, the marks that are added are called "diacritics". Though they are useful for generating crazy text which we can copy and paste into the comments of a funny cat video on YouTube, they're also very useful when we want to augment the way a letter is pronounced. By adding a diacritic, we can specify that the letter is pronounced in a different way than usual.