Two completely different ways to cross out text
The first is markup. Wrap a word in tildes — ~~like this~~ — and an app that
understands the convention draws a line through it. The word itself is unchanged, which
means any app that does not understand the convention shows the tildes instead.
The second is Unicode, and it is what this page produces. The struck characters are separate code points, so there is nothing to interpret: the line is part of the letter. It pastes anywhere, including fields that have no formatting support at all.
Which apps understand tildes
- Discord, Slack, Reddit, GitHub, Notion — yes, tildes work.
- WhatsApp — no. It uses its own markers for bold, italic and monospace, but not strikethrough.
- Instagram and TikTok — no. Captions and bios are plain text, so only the Unicode version survives.
- Email — depends entirely on the client.
Strikethrough is a joke format, and that costs readability
The visual convention means “this was said and then taken back”, which is why it reads as
sarcasm: great idea. The cost is that screen readers and search engines do not see
the line — they read the letters as the normal word. If the crossed-out part is the joke,
a reader who cannot see it gets a sentence that means the opposite of what you wrote.
Mixing it with bold or italic
The pre-built combinations at the bottom of the list save you stacking two styles by hand. Bold strike is the loudest and works for a single word; italic strike is softer and reads better in a sentence. Beyond two styles the characters get busy and the line stops being legible at phone size.
Related pages
- Bold text generator — the same block without the line.
- Small text generator — small caps, superscript and subscript.
- Instagram fonts — what actually pastes into a bio.
- All 178 styles — every strike variant alongside the rest.