Off: each word gets its own line.
Strike through your text, l̵i̵k̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵i̵s̵, and the line stays when you paste it into a bio, a caption or a name. The line is a second character after every letter, so “strike” becomes 12 characters, and a name field that takes 30 holds 15 struck letters. Emoji and line breaks get no line: a line drawn over 👍 shows as a dotted circle in most fonts, so the tool leaves it out.
Where a chat app has its own code, use it: the app draws a real line in its own font, and the words stay searchable. Discord, Reddit, Telegram and Markdown take two tildes on each side, ~~done~~. WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and Google Chat take one, ~done~. The Apps tab writes your text with the right one for each, line by line.
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube titles and most name fields have no code at all and print the tildes as they are. That's where the Strikethrough tab earns its place.
Screen readers stumble on it. To them s̵a̵l̵e̵ is four letters with four marks, and some spell it out or skip it, so don't cross out anything a reader needs to follow the post. A search for “sale” won't usually find it either.
The line is drawn letter by letter, so a font that sets its marks a little off leaves small gaps between letters. To take the line off again, paste the text into Fix Fake Text. To draw the line under the words instead, use Underline Text.
In a document or a chat app with a format bar, a shortcut is faster than pasting:
| App | Windows | Mac |
|---|---|---|
| Google Docs | Alt+Shift+5 | ⌘+Shift+X |
| Excel | Ctrl+5 | ⌘+Shift+X |
| Word | Ctrl+D, tick Strikethrough | ⌘+Shift+X |
| Slack | Ctrl+Shift+X | ⌘+Shift+X |
| Telegram Desktop | Ctrl+Shift+X | Not listed |
A line through a word keeps it readable while saying it no longer counts:
Alt+Shift+5 in Google Docs, Ctrl+5 in Excel, and Ctrl+Shift+X in Slack and Telegram Desktop. On a Mac it is Cmd+Shift+X in Google Docs, Excel, Word and Slack. Word for Windows has no shortcut of its own: press Ctrl+D and tick Strikethrough in the Font box.
Discord draws a line through anything between two pairs of tildes.
Where an app has no strikethrough button, paste text that carries its own line.
Put one tilde on each side: ~like this~. Keep the tildes tight against the first and last letter, because ~ like this ~ goes out with the tildes showing. On a phone you can also select the words and pick Strikethrough from the format menu.
Two tildes on each side, ~~like this~~. It isn't in the original Markdown: GitHub added it in GitHub Flavored Markdown, and GitLab, Obsidian and most editors followed. An older parser that only knows the original prints the tildes as they are.
Use <s> for something that is no longer true, like an old price, and <del> for text removed in an edit. Both draw the line. If you only want the look, use CSS text-decoration: line-through. The old <strike> tag still works in browsers but is obsolete, so skip it.
Not with a button or a code: Instagram shows ~~text~~ with the tildes. Paste Unicode strikethrough instead and the line comes with it, in a bio, a caption or a comment. Keep it short, because every struck letter counts as two characters toward the limit.
If the line came from Unicode, it is a separate character after each letter, and Fix Fake Text on this site deletes it and gives you plain letters back. If it came from a document, the line is formatting: select the text and press the same strikethrough shortcut again, or paste it as plain text.