Scary Text Generator

What cursed text is made of, and how readable it stays

The cursed text here is plain Unicode: blackletter letters from the mathematical alphabets, look-alike letters borrowed from other scripts, and a symbol at each end. It copies as text, but the reader's fonts decide what is actually drawn.

Where the blackletter letters come from

The Gothic recipes use two alphabets from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block: Fraktur (capital A at U+1D504) and bold Fraktur (capital A at U+1D56C). They were encoded so that a Fraktur variable in a formula stays distinct from an ordinary one. Five regular Fraktur capitals, ℭ ℌ ℑ ℜ ℨ, sit in the older Letterlike Symbols block, and a device may take them from a different font, so a capital C, H, I, R or Z can look out of step with its neighbours. Bold Fraktur has no such gaps. Neither alphabet has digits or punctuation, which is why numbers stay plain.

Borrowed letters and rare symbols

Thorn Frame and Sigil Frame do not use Fraktur. They imitate Latin shapes with Thai, Hebrew, Cyrillic and other letters. Hebrew and Arabic are written right to left, so an app may reorder part of the word, and people who read those scripts see unrelated letters.

The frame symbols are not equally common. ☠ and † are in nearly every font, while ⛧, ⸸ and 𖤐 are in far fewer and are the first to appear as an empty box or a question mark. Check the result on a second device before relying on it.

Screen readers and search

A screen reader may announce each Fraktur letter by its long Unicode name, read only some of them, or skip the word. Search treats 𝕸𝖎𝖉𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 and Midnight as different text unless the service converts one to the other, and a service that converts may also store your styled name as plain letters. Use these styles for a short title or display name, and keep handles, links and anything people must type or say aloud in ordinary letters.

More questions

Is cursed text a font I can install?

No. Nothing is installed or downloaded. Each letter is replaced by a different Unicode character, so the look travels with the text and depends on the fonts already on the reader's device.

Why do some cursed symbols show as boxes or question marks?

The device has no font containing that character. Letters in the Fraktur styles are widely covered; the rarer frame symbols are not. Pick a recipe with a more common symbol if the text has to display for a wide audience.

Why do numbers stay normal in the Gothic styles?

Unicode encodes Fraktur letters only. There are no Fraktur digits or punctuation marks, so those characters pass through unchanged.

Why did part of my text change order after pasting?

Thorn Frame and Sigil Frame contain Hebrew and Arabic letters, which software lays out right to left. Use a Fraktur recipe if the letter order must stay fixed.