Text & Unicode Glossary
Plain-English definitions for Unicode, internet text styles, encoding systems, and everything in between.
Unicode
Unicode is the universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character in every language, script, and symbol system used worldwide.
Read definition →Zalgo Text
Zalgo text is glitchy, corrupted-looking text created by stacking large numbers of Unicode combining characters above and below ordinary letters.
Read definition →Morse Code
Morse code is a character-encoding system that represents letters, numbers, and punctuation using sequences of short signals (dots) and long signals (dashes).
Read definition →Kaomoji
Kaomoji are Japanese text emoticons made entirely from Unicode characters, designed to be read upright rather than sideways like Western emoticons.
Read definition →Leet Speak
Leet speak (also written as 1337) is an internet alphabet that substitutes letters with visually similar numbers and symbols, originally developed in early hacker and gaming culture.
Read definition →Fancy Font
A fancy font, in the context of online text tools, refers to Unicode character sets that visually mimic different typeface styles — bold, italic, cursive, script, fraktur — and can be pasted anywhere.
Read definition →Aesthetic Text
Aesthetic text is a visual text style that uses Unicode fullwidth characters and deliberate spacing to create the spaced-out, wide-letter look associated with vaporwave and internet aesthetics.
Read definition →Invisible Character
An invisible character is a real Unicode character that takes up space and is treated as a character by software, but renders as completely blank with no visible shape.
Read definition →Bubble Text
Bubble text uses Unicode enclosed alphanumeric characters — letters inside circles — to create a distinctive "circled" or "bubbled" visual text style.
Read definition →ASCII Art
ASCII art is visual artwork created using the 95 printable characters of the ASCII character set, arranged spatially to form images, patterns, and text designs.
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