Sometimes you want text that whispers: a line of tiny letters under a post, a raised footnote number, a chemical formula with a lowered 2, or a bio in neat small capitals. Most apps don’t give you a superscript button, but Unicode has the characters you need. This generator swaps ordinary letters for their small look-alikes.
The four styles
Small caps replaces lowercase letters with small capital letters, so “hello” becomes “ʜᴇʟʟᴏ” in lookalike capitals at lowercase height. It gives a clean, label-like style that works well for names, headings and short phrases. Any capital letters you typed are left as they are, which is why the first letter of a sentence stays bigger.
Superscript raises letters, digits and some symbols above the line and shrinks them: “ᴴᵉˡˡᵒ ²⁰²⁶”. It’s what you’d use for footnote markers, exponents, ordinal endings like 1ˢᵗ and for the tiny text effect that’s popular in social bios.
Subscript lowers and shrinks characters below the line, the way the 2 in H₂O sits. Coverage here is thin: Unicode has subscript versions of only a handful of letters and all the digits, so subscript works best for digits and short formulas.
Small caps with raised digits combines the first and second looks for a neat result when your text contains numbers.
Each result has a Copy button. Paste it into any app that accepts normal text.
Why these are real characters
When you format a word as superscript in a word processor, the letters don’t change. The program just draws them smaller and higher. Copy that text into a chat window and the formatting vanishes. The characters used here are different: each is its own Unicode character, such as the raised “ᵃ”, so they paste anywhere text is allowed.
The trade-off is coverage. Unicode didn’t set out to provide a complete tiny alphabet, so some letters exist and some don’t. In superscript you’ll find nearly all lowercase letters but only some capitals, and no q in many fonts. In subscript the list is shorter still. Letters with no small version are simply left unchanged, and the tool tells you so.
Where people use it
- Social media bios and captions, for a subtle, tidy look.
- Footnote markers and citations in plain text, like this¹ or that².
- Chemistry and maths in plain text: H₂O, CO₂, x², 10⁹.
- Dates and ordinals: 1ˢᵗ, 2ⁿᵈ, 3ʳᵈ.
- Gaming names and chat, for stylised handles.
- Design mock-ups where you want a tiny line of text without opening an editor.
Things to watch
Readability. Tiny text is harder to read, especially on a phone and for people with weaker eyesight. Keep it to short phrases, and never use it for anything essential.
Accessibility. Screen readers may read these characters oddly, spelling out their long Unicode names, or skip them. A footnote number is fine; a whole sentence in superscript is not.
Search. Search tools treat the small versions as different characters from plain letters, so text written this way won’t match a search for the plain word.
Font support. The rarer characters, especially some subscript letters, may show as boxes on older devices or in fonts that don’t include them. Check on a second device if it matters.
More styles to try
The same Unicode trick powers many other styles. The fancy text generator has bold, script, fraktur and circled letters. The big text generator goes in the opposite direction with giant block letters. For flipped text there’s upside down text, and glitch text goes wild with stacked marks. Our guide to how fancy text fonts work explains why they behave as they do.
More ways to restyle letters
Superscript and small caps are two of many Unicode text styles. Bold text and cursive text add weight and flourish, bubble text draws letters in circles, and the underline and strikethrough generators mark text up in places with no formatting buttons.