Strikethrough Text for WhatsApp

How to cross out a word on WhatsApp

To cross out a word on WhatsApp, wrap it in tildes: type ~word~ and WhatsApp shows it with a line through it. This works inside chats and photo captions, with no spaces between the tildes and the text. For places that ignore tilde formatting, such as your name, your About, your status text or a group subject, type your text in the tool above and copy the struck-through version instead. It carries the line as real characters, so it survives anywhere you paste it. Both methods are explained in full below.

Cross out text anywhere on WhatsApp, not just in a chat

Strike Through Whatsapp is a free tool that turns whatever you type into struck-through characters you can paste straight into WhatsApp. You type a word or a whole sentence, the tool draws a line through it, and you copy the result. It runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you type ever leaves your device. The tool is for anyone who wants that “crossed out” look in a WhatsApp message, in their About text, on their status, or in a group name, and who has discovered that WhatsApp’s own formatting does not cover all of those places.

Most people already know WhatsApp lets you strike through a message by wrapping it in tildes, so that ~sold out~ shows up with a line through it. That native trick is genuinely useful, but it only works inside the chat compose box and inside media captions. It does nothing in your profile name, your About line, a group subject, or a broadcast list title, because those fields ignore WhatsApp formatting entirely. This tool solves that gap by producing real struck-through characters instead of relying on WhatsApp to do the rendering for you.

How the tool actually works

There are two ways to get a line through text on WhatsApp, and it helps to understand both because they behave differently.

WhatsApp’s native tilde formatting

Inside a chat, WhatsApp reads certain symbols as formatting instructions. A tilde on each side of your text (~like this~) tells the app to render strikethrough, the same way asterisks give you bold and underscores give you italics. The underlying characters stay ordinary; WhatsApp simply displays them with a line drawn over them. Because this is display formatting, it only lives where WhatsApp chooses to interpret it, which means the message body and captions and nowhere else.

Unicode combining characters

This tool uses a different, more portable method. After every character you type, it inserts an invisible Unicode combining mark called the combining long stroke overlay (code point U+0336). A combining mark is a character that has no width of its own and instead attaches a stroke to the character right before it. String enough of them together and the result is a run of letters that each carry their own horizontal line. The important part is that the strikethrough is now baked into the text as actual characters, not as formatting that an app has to opt into. That is why you can drop the output into fields that normally strip formatting, such as your WhatsApp name or your About text, and the line survives.

So the workflow is straightforward. Type your text, let the tool weave a U+0336 after each character, then copy the whole string. When you paste it into WhatsApp, every device that supports Unicode (which is every modern phone) shows the line because the line is part of the text itself.

Real use cases

People reach for struck-through text on WhatsApp for reasons that are surprisingly specific once you look closely.

• Marking something as no longer available. Sellers running a small shop through WhatsApp status or a broadcast list will cross out a price or an item so followers can see it was there but has changed. Writing ~199~ now 149 in a caption reads as a discount at a glance.
• Editing a plan in a group chat without deleting history. When the meeting time moves, striking the old time and adding the new one keeps context. Everyone sees what changed rather than a bare correction.
• A crossed-out name or About line. Because your WhatsApp name and your About field ignore tilde formatting, the only way to show a struck word there is the Unicode method this tool produces. Someone might set their About to a struck old job title next to a new one, or cross out a word for a playful effect.
• Group subjects and descriptions. Group admins sometimes cross out an old event name in the group subject when a series moves on to its next edition, keeping the past visible.
• Tone and humour in a message. Writers use strikethrough to show a thought they are pretending to take back, the classic “I would never do that” gag, which lands well in one-to-one chats.

Best practices

Use the native tilde method when you are only writing inside a normal chat and you want clean, accessible text. Native formatting stays fully readable if someone copies it elsewhere, and it does not confuse screen readers as much as stacked combining marks can. Reserve the Unicode output from this tool for the places native formatting cannot reach, mainly your name, About, status text, and group subjects.

Keep struck passages short. A crossed-out price, a single obsolete word, or a short phrase communicates instantly. Running a full paragraph through strikethrough is hard to read and defeats the purpose, since the point of crossing out is to contrast it against normal text around it.

Preview before you commit, especially for your About or a group name, because those are seen by many people and are more effort to correct. Paste the output into a chat with yourself first (the message-to-self trick) to confirm it renders the way you expect on your own device.

Pair strikethrough with a replacement rather than leaving it alone. Crossing out an old time and immediately writing the new one is clearer than a lonely struck phrase that leaves readers guessing what it was replaced with.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

The most frequent error with the native method is spacing. WhatsApp will not apply tilde formatting if there is a space directly inside the tildes, so ~ sold ~ fails while ~sold~ works. Put the tildes tight against the text with no gap.

Another mistake is expecting tilde formatting to work in your profile. It never will, no matter how you type it, because those fields do not parse WhatsApp markdown. If you tried tildes in your About and saw the literal ~ characters, that is expected behaviour, and it is exactly the situation the Unicode output is built for.

Some people paste the combining-character version into a normal chat where the plain tilde method would have been cleaner. There is nothing wrong with it, but the native approach produces tidier underlying text, so prefer it inside chats and save the Unicode version for the fields that need it.

Finally, watch out for mixing this with other formatting. Stacking strikethrough with bold and italics using tildes, asterisks, and underscores at once is allowed in a chat, but the order and the tight spacing matter. Format one style at a time and test it rather than wrapping a phrase in several symbols and hoping.

Troubleshooting

The line does not appear after pasting. If you used the native tilde method, check that no spaces sit inside the tildes and that you are in a chat or caption, not a profile field. If you used the Unicode output and the line is missing, the app or keyboard you pasted through may have stripped the combining marks; recopy from this tool and paste directly into WhatsApp without passing through another editor first.

The text shows odd boxes or gaps. A very old device or a stripped-down font can fail to render U+0336 and may show a placeholder box. This is a font limitation on the viewing device, not a mistake in your text. When you need the widest compatibility, use the native tilde method inside a chat instead, since that relies on WhatsApp rather than on the font.

The strikethrough vanished when I edited the message. Editing can re-trigger WhatsApp’s parser for the native method, and inserting a space in the wrong place breaks the tildes. Re-check the spacing after any edit. For the Unicode version, deleting a character can leave an orphaned combining mark, so it is safest to clear the field and paste a fresh copy.

It works on my phone but a friend sees plain text. With combining characters this is almost always the friend’s font or a much older operating system. There is no setting you can flip on their end from your side, so for anything important, prefer the native chat method, which WhatsApp renders consistently across supported versions.

Whichever route you take, this tool gives you the struck-through text in a second and keeps every keystroke on your own device, so you can format for WhatsApp without sending your words to anyone.