What is Zalgo? The creepypasta and the glitch text, explained

What the Zalgo legend says

Zalgo has no single story. It is a presence that breaks into other things, preferably the most harmless things available. A familiar newspaper strip runs normally until the last panel, where a character's eyes go black, the mouth splits open around something dark and tentacled, and the caption invokes Zalgo or announces that he is on his way. The catchphrase fans repeat whenever he is near is "He comes."

The Creepypasta Wiki's page gathers the mythology that grew around the name. Zalgo is called He Who Waits Behind the Wall and described as an eyeless thing with seven mouths, holding a dead star in one hand and, in the other, a candle that gives off shadow instead of light. Six of the mouths each talk in a different language; the seventh is saved for a final song that will end the world. None of this appears in the original strips. According to the same page, Zalgo's creator has said it only affects comics, cartoons and drawings, not reality.

Where it started

The Zalgo true story is short. On 27 July 2004 Shmorky, a cartoonist and Flash animator who belonged to the Something Awful forums, put a batch of edited newspaper strips, Nancy and Archie among them, on his personal website, according to meme.com's history of the meme; the Creepypasta Wiki says they sat on a semi-secret parodies page. Two of them mention Zalgo. The Creepypasta Wiki notes that in these first strips Zalgo is named but never shown; the black eyes and tentacles came later, from other people's edits.

Shmorky has been plain about where the name came from. In an August 2009 post on the Something Awful forums, quoted on the Creepypasta Wiki and written after the internet had started building a mythology for it, he said: "I just made it up." He added that it had nothing to do with H. P. Lovecraft, and that watching it turn into a meme had put him off making more Zalgo edits.

How the Zalgo legend grew

Other people took the joke and ran with it. On 2 December 2008 the horror blog Grim Reviews posted a roundup titled The Zalgo Comic Chronicles, collecting anonymous Zalgo edits of Garfield and the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del. It filed Zalgo under Lovecraft-flavoured humour, described it as still limited to a handful of fringe forums and image boards, and did not say who had started it. The first Urban Dictionary definition followed on 15 February 2009, opening with a mock incantation, "To invoke the hive-mind representing chaos," and naming Zalgo the Nezperdian hive-mind of chaos.

meme.com dates the earliest archived 4chan thread about Zalgo to March 2009. From there the character spread to TV Tropes, DeviantArt and the Creepypasta Wiki, which today bans users from posting Zalgo text in its discussion areas. Shmorky returned to his creation himself on 23 October 2011, when Something Awful published a Halloween Flash cartoon in his Flash Tub column. It was titled ZALGO and spliced a black tentacled creature into children's cartoons, and its Happy Halloween caption on the page was written in the glitch lettering by then known as Zalgo text.

Zalgo text explained: how the glitch lettering works

Zalgo text is ordinary letters with dozens of accent marks piled above and below each one, so the words seem to drip or smear into the lines around them. It works because of how Unicode, the standard computers use to encode text, handles accents. Many accents exist as combining characters, which follow the letter they modify in the stored text and are positioned around it on screen. A plain a followed by U+0308, the combining diaeresis, displays as ä. The Unicode Standard sets no limit on how many combining characters may follow a base letter, and real scripts do use more than one; its own example is Thai, where a vowel sign and a tone mark can sit one above the other on a consonant. By default, extra marks above a letter stack upward in the order they are typed, and marks below stack downward.

Zalgo text pushes that freedom to absurd lengths. Unicode's report on normalization acknowledges that extremely long runs of combining marks are "not illegal", while noting that for practical purposes they mean nothing. Because software that processes text in fixed-size buffers can struggle with such runs, the report defines an optional Stream-Safe Text Format that caps them at 30 marks in a row, a limit it describes as far beyond anything a language or technical notation needs. The format is optional, and nothing obliges a website to enforce it. Zalgo text's towering stacks spill into neighbouring lines, and some communities, the Creepypasta Wiki among them, ban it outright.

Which details hold up

• The creator: Shmorky, who says he made the name up for his 2004 strips and that it owes nothing to Lovecraft.
• The entity: fiction. Its titles, its seven mouths and its rituals were added later by fans; the 2004 strips only name it.
• The text effect: real Unicode behaviour, described in the standard itself. Anyone can produce it.
• The curse: there is no evidence of any effect beyond a page that is hard to read.

Common questions

Verdict

Zalgo explained: a 2004 joke by one cartoonist that other people turned into a mythology, and a name that then stuck to a real quirk of Unicode. Is Zalgo real? The entity is not, and its creator said so in 2009. The text is real, and nothing in the Unicode Standard forbids it. Real or Legend files the Zalgo creepypasta as fiction.