Bold and italic text you paste into a bio are substitute letters. Strikethrough is different: the letters stay exactly what they were, and an invisible character after each one draws a line through it. That makes it the only one of the fancy text styles that keeps the original letters, and it brings its own quirks.
One Mark After Every Letter
Unicode has a class of characters called combining marks. They have no width of their own; a font draws each one on top of, under or through the character before it. Accents work this way when they are typed separately: e followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT displays as é.
Strikethrough uses U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY, a horizontal bar through the middle of the preceding character. Put one after every letter, and after every space, and the bars join into what looks like a single line: s̶a̶l̶e̶ is s, U+0336, a, U+0336, l, U+0336, e, U+0336.
The other line styles work the same way with different marks: U+0332 COMBINING LOW LINE for underline, U+0333 COMBINING DOUBLE LOW LINE for a double underline, and U+0338 COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY for the slash through each letter.
The Four Line Styles
| Style | Mark | Unicode name | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strikethrough | U+0336 | Combining Long Stroke Overlay | Old prices, corrections, jokes |
| Underline | U+0332 | Combining Low Line | Emphasis, titles in plain-text styles |
| Double underline | U+0333 | Combining Double Low Line | Totals, strong emphasis |
| Slashed | U+0338 | Combining Long Solidus Overlay | Negation, a crossed-out look |
What the Extra Characters Do
Doubling the number of characters in a piece of text has consequences that are easy to miss when it looks fine on screen.
Length doubles on X
X counts each code point, and U+0336 counts as one like any Latin letter. A struck word costs twice its plain length, so a 150-character strikethrough post comes to 300 and will not send on a standard account.
The line can break up
Whether the bars meet depends on the font. In some, small gaps appear between letters or the bar stops short of the last character. Wide letters such as m and w are where it shows first.
Search still finds nothing
Even though the letters are ordinary, the marks between them stop the word from matching. A search for sale does not find s̶a̶l̶e̶.
Screen readers lose the meaning
Depending on the reader, the marks are either ignored, so a struck old price is read out as if it were current, or announced by name after every letter. Neither tells a listener the text was crossed out.
Editing is awkward
Backspace usually deletes the mark first and the letter second, so fixing a typo in struck text means deleting twice per character.
Use the app's own strikethrough where it has one
WhatsApp and Slack strike text written as ~like this~, Discord, Telegram and Reddit use ~~like this~~, and YouTube comments use -like this-. Native strikethrough is real formatting, so it stays searchable and does not double the length.
Strike through your text
Strikethrough, underline, double underline and slash, ready to paste.
What a Struck Line Means
On the web, HTML separates two meanings of a line through text. The HTML standard defines <s> for content that is no longer accurate or relevant, such as an old price, and <del> for text that has been removed in an edit. Both are drawn the same way, but they tell software different things.
Plain-text strikethrough carries neither meaning; it is purely visual. That suits the way it is used on social media, where it is mostly a joke format: write the honest thought, strike it, then write the polite one after it. The reader sees both, which is the point.
For anything practical, such as a changed price, a cancelled date or a correction, write the change out in words as well. "Now $30 (was $50)" works for every reader, including those who never see the line.
Frequently Asked Questions
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