Slash Text Generator

Diagonal slashes (also called diagonal strikethrough) use the Unicode combining character U+0338. Unlike horizontal strikethrough which draws a line through the middle, diagonal slashes go from top-left to bottom-right, creating a "forbidden" or "cancelled" appearance.

This effect is commonly used to show that something is wrong, outdated, or not allowed. It's more emphatic than regular strikethrough and carries a stronger "no" or "cancel" connotation.

When to Use Slash Text

• Showing price reductions (C̸$̸9̸9̸ → $49)
• Indicating canceled events or sold-out items
• Creating "not allowed" or "forbidden" text
• Making corrections in a visible way

The character doing the work

Slashed text isn't a font and not a style setting. It works by inserting a combining character after each letter you type. The combining long solidus overlay draws a diagonal stroke across whatever character precedes it, so the sequence of letter followed by combining mark renders as a single slashed glyph. Your original letters are untouched underneath. That is why deleting a slashed character sometimes takes two backspaces: you're removing the mark and the letter separately.

There's a shorter variant, the combining short solidus overlay, which draws a smaller stroke that doesn't extend past the letter body. Support for the short form is noticeably patchier, so the long overlay is the safer choice when you need the effect to survive being pasted somewhere you don't control.

Why it renders differently everywhere

Combining marks are positioned by the font, not by the platform, so the same string genuinely looks different depending on where it lands. A font with proper support centers the stroke on each glyph. A font without it falls back to drawing the mark at a default offset. Slashed text then appears with the stroke sitting too far left, doubled up, or floating beside the letter rather than through it. Wide letters like m and w show the mismatch most clearly because the stroke was designed for average-width glyphs.

Numbers and punctuation are the least reliable. Many fonts only include overlay positioning for Latin letters, so digits often end up with a stroke that overshoots or misses entirely. If a slashed price or date is the point of your text, check it on the destination platform before publishing.

Where it will and won't survive

Because the effect is built from real characters rather than markup, it travels through plain text fields that would strip any formatting: bios, usernames where permitted, chat messages, and comments. The trade-off is that the text stops being searchable in the normal way, and screen readers handle combining overlays inconsistently. So it's worth keeping slashed text to short decorative fragments rather than anything a reader needs to parse.

One practical warning: some platforms count each combining mark as a separate character against their limit. A slashed string can therefore consume roughly twice the allowance of the same words unslashed, which catches people out on fields with tight caps.

For a regular horizontal strikethrough, use our Strikethrough Text Generator.