Unicode has no way to rotate text. There is no upside-down attribute and no turned version of the alphabet. ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpᴉsdn is assembled by hand from characters that happen to look like rotated letters, collected from phonetic transcription, mathematical logic and three unrelated writing systems.
Flipping Is Two Steps
Turning a line of text 180 degrees does two things. Each letter is rotated, and the order is reversed, because what was the last letter is now on the left. A generator that only swaps letters produces text that reads backwards when you turn your phone around.
This tool does both: it reverses the text, then replaces each character with its rotated counterpart. Multi-line text is reversed as a whole, so the last line comes out first, exactly as a rotated page would look.
Characters made of several code points, such as emoji with skin tones or family emoji, are kept together while reversing. Splitting them would turn 👨👩👧 into three separate people and a pair of invisible joiners in the wrong order.
Lowercase: The Phonetic Alphabet Did the Work
Most of the lowercase alphabet comes from the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has used turned letters for over a century as a cheap way to create new symbols: a printer could make one by setting an existing piece of type upside down. ɐ, ɥ, ɯ, ɹ, ʇ, ʌ, ʍ and ʎ are all turned letters with their own sounds, encoded in Unicode's IPA Extensions block since 1993, and ᴉ, the turned i, followed in the Phonetic Extensions.
Other letters come for free by symmetry. Rotate b and you get q, d becomes p, n becomes u, and l, o, s, x and z look the same either way.
The rest are approximations. ǝ is the schwa-like turned e, ɔ is an open o standing in for a turned c, ɟ is a barred dotless j that passes for a turned f, ƃ is a b with a top bar used as a turned g, and ɾ, a phonetic tap, stands in for a turned j.
Where the Capitals Come From
Capitals that are symmetric under rotation, H, I, N, O, S, X and Z, need no replacement.
| Letter | Flipped | Source | Original meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | ∀ | Mathematical Operators | For all, in logic |
| B | ᗺ | Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics | A syllable character |
| C | Ɔ | Latin Extended-B | Open O, used in African languages |
| D | ᗡ | Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics | A syllable character |
| E | Ǝ | Latin Extended-B | Reversed E, from Pan-Nigerian orthography |
| F | Ⅎ | Letterlike Symbols | The Claudian letter, proposed by Emperor Claudius |
| G | ⅁ | Letterlike Symbols | Turned sans-serif G, a math symbol |
| J | ſ | Latin Extended-A | Long s, as in old printing |
| L | ˥ | Spacing Modifier Letters | A tone letter |
| P | Ԁ | Cyrillic Supplement | Komi De |
| Q | Ό | Greek | Omicron with tonos |
| R | ᴚ | Phonetic Extensions | Small capital turned R |
| T | ⊥ | Mathematical Operators | Up tack, falsehood in logic |
| U | ∩ | Mathematical Operators | Set intersection |
| V | Λ | Greek | Capital lambda |
| Y | ⅄ | Letterlike Symbols | Turned sans-serif Y |
Why some capitals look a little off
Borrowed letters are drawn to fit their own alphabet. A Canadian syllabic sits at a different height from a Latin capital, and Greek lambda is narrower than a turned V would be. In most fonts the mismatch is small, but it is why a flipped word can look slightly uneven in places a rotated image would not.
Flip your text
Letters, digits and punctuation, reversed and rotated in one step.
Numbers and Punctuation
6 and 9 swap, and 0 and 8 rotate onto themselves. The others borrow again: Ɩ (Latin iota) for 1, ᘔ (a syllabic) for 2, Ɛ (open E) for 3, ϛ (Greek stigma) for 5, and two Bopomofo characters, ㄣ and ㄥ, for 4 and 7. The Bopomofo pair come from a Chinese phonetic script and are noticeably wider in most fonts.
Punctuation rotates more cleanly. Question and exclamation marks turn into the Spanish ¿ and ¡, a full stop rises to the dot above ˙, an ampersand becomes ⅋, and paired brackets swap sides, since an opening bracket rotated is a closing one.
Like every other style on the page, flipped text costs extra on X, where most of these borrowed characters count as two, and screen readers read them as the characters they really are. Keep it for jokes and the occasional bio flourish.
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