Struck-through text is a small piece of storytelling: it shows an old price next to the new one, a joke where you take something back, a to-do that is done, or a correction that is still visible. Word processors have a strikethrough button. Most of the places we actually write, such as bios, comments, chats and forms, do not.
This tool gets around that. Type your text and it comes back with a line through every character, in five styles. Copy one and paste it where you like: s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶.
How it is done
There is no formatting involved. Unicode includes “combining characters” that attach themselves to the letter before them and draw a mark across it. The tool follows each character with one of them. The five styles use different marks: a long line through the middle, a shorter one, a slanting slash, a wavy line, and a double mark that crosses out with a slash and a line at once.
Spaces are left alone, so the gap between words stays clean and the strike runs in separate segments. Because the effect is made of characters, it stays with the text when you copy and paste.
Platform differences
Most apps draw combining marks well, but they do not all draw them the same way. The line may sit a little higher or lower, join up between letters in one place and leave gaps in another, or look slightly different at different sizes. If the style you have chosen looks off in the app you are using, try another of the five.
Some platforms offer their own markup and you should use it where you can. WhatsApp, for example, turns text between tildes into strikethrough, and Slack, Discord and a number of others use similar shortcuts. Those are cleaner than combining characters and are easier for everyone to read. This tool is for the places that do not have markup, such as Instagram bios and plain text fields.
Things to be careful with
A few cautions, in the same vein as other Unicode text styles. Screen readers often read struck text poorly, or ignore the marks and read the original words, so a reader may not know it was crossed out. Never use it for anything where the meaning depends on the strike, such as which price applies. Search will not match struck text to normal text, as it is a different string. And because a struck word is still there in the text, a copy-paste will carry the original along with it; do not use it to hide something you do not want read.
If you want to remove the marks later, remove special characters will strip them. For other effects see the underline text generator, and the fancy text generator for the full list.