How Strikethrough Text Actually Works (Combining Marks)

Unlike bold or script, strikethrough (and underline, overline, and dotted) text isn't a different letter — it's the same letter with a small extra Unicode character, called a combining mark, glued onto it. "a̶" is two code points: the ordinary letter "a", followed immediately by U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY.

Why that matters

Because the base letter is untouched, this is one of our most cleanly reversible styles: our Plain Text Converter simply strips the specific combining mark it recognizes as its own, leaving the original letter exactly as it was. It never strips a combining mark it didn't add itself — so a genuine accent (like the acute accent on é, which is also technically a combining mark in its decomposed form) is never touched, even though both are "combining characters" in the same general Unicode category.

Why only plain ASCII letters get a mark

We add the mark only to bare ASCII letters (A–Z, a–z) — never to a letter that already carries an accent, and never to digits, emoji, or non-Latin scripts. Two reasons: first, stacking a second mark onto an already-accented letter can render unpredictably (some fonts don't position multiple combining marks cleanly); second, applying combining marks to scripts they weren't designed for (Arabic, Devanagari, emoji sequences) can break how those scripts are supposed to render entirely. Unmarked characters are preserved exactly, not silently dropped.

The five combining-mark styles at a glance

A rendering caveat

Combining-mark rendering is more font-dependent than most other styles: the mark's exact vertical position relative to the letter can shift between fonts, and on multi-line text or adjacent styled letters, marks can visually overlap in narrower fonts. This is a known limitation of relying on the same Unicode mechanism fonts use for real accents — we haven't catalogued exact device/app rendering differences yet (see testing methodology).

Native strikethrough/underline vs. this style

Many apps offer their own native strikethrough or underline (a real formatting instruction, the same mechanism WhatsApp's ~tilde~ syntax uses — see our WhatsApp formatting guide). Native formatting usually renders more cleanly and consistently, because the app controls exactly how the line is drawn rather than relying on a font's combining-mark positioning. The tradeoff is the same one that runs through every native-vs-Unicode comparison on this site: native formatting is typically local to that one app and disappears when the text is copied elsewhere, while this combining-mark version is literal characters that travel with the text wherever it's pasted — bios, usernames, plain-text fields where native formatting isn't available at all.

A worked example across a full word

Style "cancel" with strikethrough and each of the six letters individually receives its own copy of U+0336: c̶a̶n̶c̶e̶l̶. Because the mark belongs to each letter rather than spanning the word as one continuous line, the visual result can look slightly different from a native strikethrough (which usually draws one unbroken line across the whole word) — on some fonts the per-letter marks connect almost seamlessly, on others small gaps are visible between letters. This is a direct, visible consequence of the underlying mechanism being letter-by-letter rather than word-level, and it's the same reason multi-line text works correctly (each line's letters are marked independently, so the effect never "leaks" from one line into the next the way a single continuous native strikethrough might).

What happens with spaces and punctuation

Only bare ASCII letters are eligible for a mark, so the spaces between words in "cancel this" never receive a stray combining character, and punctuation like commas or periods stays unmarked too. That keeps the marked effect visually confined to the actual letters, rather than producing a continuous line underneath the entire sentence including its spacing — a deliberate, conservative choice over a design that tries to look like one unbroken line at the cost of touching characters we can't confidently style.

The same mechanism, six different visual effects

It's worth noticing that strikethrough, underline, double underline, overline, dotted and slashed are not six unrelated tricks — they're the exact same technique (append one specific combining mark to a bare ASCII letter) applied with six different mark characters from the table above. Once you understand how one of them works, you understand all six; the only difference in the underlying mechanism between any two of these styles is which single Unicode combining character gets attached to each letter.

What this looks like when copied into different contexts

Because the mark travels with the letter as literal text, strikethrough-styled text pasted into a code editor, a spreadsheet cell, or a plain command-line terminal still displays the marks (rendering quality aside) — unlike a native strikethrough applied through an app's formatting menu, which is usually lost entirely outside that specific app's own document format. That portability is the main practical advantage of the combining-mark approach over relying on native formatting wherever it exists.

Questions people actually ask

Can I apply two combining marks at once, like strikethrough and underline together? Not through a single style selection here — each result applies one mark. Manually appending a second mark by combining copied output is technically possible in Unicode, but we haven't tested how reliably fonts render two stacked combining marks on the same letter, so we don't offer it as a built-in option.

Why does the line look broken or gappy on my phone? That's the font-dependent positioning mentioned above — different fonts draw the same combining mark at slightly different heights and widths, and monospace or narrow fonts tend to show more visible gaps between marked letters than wider, more spaced-out fonts.

Does this work on accented letters, like crossing out "café"? No — by design, combining marks are only added to bare, unaccented ASCII letters, so the é in "café" is left completely unmarked while c, a, and f would each receive a mark. See our multilingual names guide for why we treat accented letters this way throughout the whole site, not just in this style.