Normal text is only so loud. A big, chunky word on a post or banner says something that regular letters can’t. The big text generator turns short words into giant block letters, and also produces several other “big” Unicode styles that you can paste into chats and bios.
The four results
Giant block letters draws each letter on a grid five rows tall and five columns wide, filled with a character of your choice. “HI” becomes two tall, solid letters spread over five lines. By default the filled cells are solid blocks (█) and the gaps are spaces, but you can change either: use a hash, an asterisk, a dot, a heart or any emoji. The block letters cover A to Z, 0 to 9 and a handful of punctuation marks (full stop, comma, hyphen, exclamation mark and question mark).
Regional indicator letters are special Unicode characters used to build country flags. Standing alone, each shows as a capital letter in a box, which makes a large, bold-looking word. On some platforms, two adjacent letters may merge into a flag, so a zero-width space is placed between letters to prevent that.
Fullwidth letters are wide, spaced characters from East Asian typography. They give text a stretched, aesthetic look.
Bold squared letters place each letter on a dark square, which looks like a row of keyboard keys or signage.
Each result has its own Copy button.
Getting block letters to line up
Block letters are made of rows, and every row must line up with the others. That only works in a fixed-width font, where every character takes the same horizontal space. Code editors and terminals use one, as do code blocks in many chat apps and forums. Most social apps use a proportional font, in which characters have different widths, and the rows drift out of alignment, turning your giant letters into a mess.
Three ways to get a clean result:
- Paste it into a place with a fixed-width font: a code block, a text file, a terminal or a pre-formatted comment.
- Use a solid fill like █ and a space, which are designed to be the same width in most fonts.
- Take a screenshot of the aligned result and share the image instead of the text.
If you want letters that work in ordinary text, the regional indicator, fullwidth and squared styles are single-line text, so they stay together wherever you paste them.
Using emoji as the fill
Type an emoji in Letter character, such as 🔥 or ⭐, and set Space character to a plain space. You’ll get letters drawn out of flames or stars. Emoji are wider than a space, so the letters look uneven unless the space is also an emoji-width character. A common trick is to use a wide space such as an ideographic space or a coloured square for the background, such as ⬜ for white. Keep words short, because emoji letters quickly get very wide. The emoji repeater can help you build rows and borders to go with them.
Tips
- Short words win. Each letter is five columns wide, so a five-letter word is about thirty columns. Long words overflow lines and wrap in awkward places.
- Stick to capital letters. The generator converts your text to capitals, since the block font has only one case.
- Use line breaks for longer messages. Each line you type becomes its own row of giant letters.
- Preview before posting. The Copy button gives you exactly what you see, but the place you paste it decides how it looks.
When not to use it
Giant text is eye-catching and a bit shouty. It’s fine for a banner, a joke, a README header or a celebration, and tiresome in a long conversation. Big blocks of text can flood a chat and annoy others, and many communities consider repeated large blocks spam. Screen readers also struggle with block letters, reading out each block character, so don’t use it for anything people must read.
More ways to play with text
For the opposite effect, small text shrinks letters into superscript and small caps. The fancy text generator offers bold, script and fraktur styles, and upside down text flips everything over. If you need a word repeated to fill a banner, try the text repeater. To understand why these characters behave as they do, read how fancy text fonts work.
Other ways to make letters stand out
If giant blocks are more than you need, bubble text puts each letter in a circle or square, and wide text spaces letters out in the vaporwave style. Both stay on one line, so they survive being pasted into apps that use a proportional font, which is where block letters tend to fall apart. For heavier letters without changing the layout, the bold text generator does the job.