Underline Text Generator

How underlining works in plain text

Unicode has no underline style. Instead, every letter gets a combining character that is drawn under it: Underline adds ̲ (U+0332 COMBINING LOW LINE) after each letter and space, and Double Underline adds ̳ (U+0333 COMBINING DOUBLE LOW LINE).

That's why underlined text is longer than it looks: “hello” underlined is 10 characters, not 5.

Gaps or one solid line

With Underline, each letter carries its own short piece of line, and some fonts leave small gaps between the pieces. Long Underline uses ͟ (U+035F COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON BELOW) instead: a mark that reaches from one letter to the next, so the pieces overlap into one line. Its last piece runs a little past the final letter. Arrow Underline, Long Overline and Wavy Overline are built the same way.

Real underline in Discord

Discord underlines text written between two underscores on each side: __underline__. Real formatting keeps the words searchable, so use it inside Discord messages and Unicode underline where there's no formatting at all.

Before you paste

It's different text, not just a different look. To a computer, 𝒽ℯ𝓁𝓁ℴ is not the word hello. Keep the words people search for (your name, your shop, your username) in plain letters.

Screen readers may stumble. They can announce each styled letter by its Unicode name (“mathematical bold capital H”) or skip it, which makes the text hard to follow for people who rely on them. Use styles for a few words, not for whole paragraphs.

It can count double. Many styled letters (all the cursive, bold, italic and gothic ones) live outside the first 65,536 Unicode characters, so they take two UTF-16 code units. Web forms that limit length with the HTML maxlength attribute count those units, and X counts these letters as two characters each toward its 280-character limit.