Creepy text generator

The page starts with Hang marks set to below only and six marks a letter, which is the setting that drips. Everything grows downwards, so the line above stays clean and the text is still readable while it decays.

Push Marks per letter higher for something closer to a puddle. Swap the boxes to take it all off again.

Every mark under those letters was added to Unicode so that linguists could write down how a sound is made. U+0325, the ring below, marks a consonant said without the voice. U+032A, the bridge below, says the tongue is against the teeth rather than the ridge behind them. U+0329 turns a consonant into the centre of its own syllable, which is what the l is doing in "bottle".

Nobody designing them was thinking about Halloween. They're stacked here in combinations no language would ever produce, which is exactly why the result looks wrong to a reader and means nothing to a linguist.

Marks that only grow downwards are the friendliest version of this effect, because the damage stays inside one line and a layout with a fixed line height can usually absorb it. Message boxes, captions and most bios take it.

Names are the usual exception. Platforms normalise those, and normalising is exactly what removes a stack of marks.

There's one thing worth knowing before pasting it anywhere serious. A screen reader may announce each mark by name, so a six-mark letter can arrive as seven spoken words.

Cursed text is this at full weight in both directions, and zalgo is the same tool with the story of where the effect got its name. For letters that look damaged without any marks at all, glitch text swaps in barred letters instead.

Something gentler for a Halloween caption: bubble text circles every letter and stays perfectly legible.