Mirror writing has a long history. Leonardo da Vinci filled notebooks with it, writing right to left with reversed letters, which probably suited a left-handed writer who did not want to smudge the ink. Children discover it on their own, and puzzle books use it. Hold it up to a mirror and it reads normally. Without one, you have the odd, fascinating job of reading backwards.
Type your text in the box and three versions appear.
The three versions
Mirrored reverses the order of the characters and also swaps each letter for its mirror image where one exists. The result looks like the original as seen in a mirror held to the right of the page. “Hello” becomes o||ɘʜ.
Mirrored, same order flips the letter shapes but leaves them where they are, so “Hello” becomes ʜɘ||o. It is useful when you want each word to look reversed but still start on the left.
Reversed is the plain reverse of the characters with no letter changes. “Hello” becomes “olleH”. That is the same as using the text reverser in its default mode.
What can and cannot be mirrored
Letters that are symmetrical, such as i, m, o, u, v, w, x and y, stay as they are. Others pair up, so b becomes d and p becomes q. For the rest, such as a, e, f, g, r, s and z, Unicode has a lookalike character that is close to a mirror image (ɒ, ɘ, ꟻ, ǫ, ɿ, ƨ and ƹ), and the tool uses that. A few matches are loose: the stand-in for k, ʞ, is really a k turned upside down, and l becomes a plain vertical bar.
The mirror alphabet has only one case, so capital letters come out in their lowercase or small-capital form: the H in “Hello” becomes ʜ.
Because the mirrored letters come from various corners of Unicode, a few of them can be missing from fonts on older devices and show as empty boxes. If a letter looks broken in the place where you paste it, switch to the reversed version.
Uses
Puzzles, treasure hunts, escape-room clues and kids’ activities. Creative captions. Testing how a design looks flipped. Some people mirror text deliberately to read it in the reflection of a window, for instance on a sign meant to be seen from the other side.
For a vertical flip instead of a horizontal one, use upside-down text. If you are interested in words that read the same both ways, the palindrome checker is the tool, and the fancy text generator has the other decorative styles. As with all text built from special characters, remember that screen readers and search engines will not treat it as the original word.