Upside Down Text Generator

How does flipped text work?

Flipped text needs 2 steps, because rotating a line by 180° turns both the letters and their order:

1. The character order is reversed, so the last letter comes first.
2. Each letter is replaced by a look-alike of its rotated shape, such as a → ɐ, e → ǝ, h → ɥ and t → ʇ.

Unicode has no "rotated" formatting, so every look-alike is a real letter from another alphabet: ɐ, ǝ, ɥ and ɹ come from the IPA Extensions block (U+0250–U+02AF), ʞ and ʇ are IPA click letters, ∀ is the mathematical "for all" sign (U+2200) and Ⅎ is the turned capital F (U+2132).

Upside down alphabet (A–Z)

The full upside down alphabet, letter by letter:

14 characters stay unchanged because they are symmetric under rotation or have no rotated look-alike: lowercase l, o, s, x, z, capitals H, I, N, O, S, X, Z, and the digits 0 and 8. The digits 6 and 9 swap. Punctuation flips too: ! becomes ¡, ? becomes ¿ and the full stop becomes ˙ (U+02D9).

What is the difference between upside down, mirror and backwards text?

Upside down, mirror and backwards text are 3 different transformations of the same line:

Mirror text alphabet

Mirror text uses look-alikes for letters that change shape when flipped horizontally, such as b ↔ d, p ↔ q, R → Я and N → И. Unicode has no mirrored form for digits, so 0–9 keep their shape:

Mirror text reads correctly when held up to a mirror, which makes it popular for ambulance-style lettering and hidden messages. Backwards text keeps normal letters and only reverses the order, which makes it the easiest of the 3 to read.

Where does upside down text work?

Upside down text works in Discord messages, Instagram captions and bios, TikTok bios, X posts and YouTube comments, because every look-alike is a standard Unicode letter. It fails in usernames on those platforms, which accept only ASCII letters, digits and a few symbols. The rare look-alikes ᗺ (U+15FA), ᗡ (U+15E1) and ᄅ (U+1105, a Hangul letter used for the flipped 2) have the lowest font coverage; the guide why fancy text shows boxes explains what happens on devices without them.

Does upside down text count as more characters?

Upside down text has the same number of characters as the input, because each letter maps to exactly 1 character. On X, look-alikes outside the first 4,352 code points weigh 2 instead of 1, so 9ᄅ0ᄅ pǝssǝɹʇS weighs more than the plain line. Mirror and backwards text weigh almost the same as the original. The social media character limits page covers X's weighted counting.

Upside down text examples

These 4 examples are common uses of flipped text:

• Australia joke: ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ ɯoɹɟ sƃuᴉʇǝǝɹ⅁
• Hat trend text: ǝǝɟɟoɔ pǝǝu I
• Mirror message: ɿoɿɿim ɒ ᴎi ɘm bɒɘɿ
• Backwards puzzle: neve ro ddo reven