Upside-Down, Mirror and Backwards Text Explained
Reversed and flipped text looks like a special font, but it is ordinary Unicode. Here is how it is made, where it works and when to avoid it.
Open the tool: Reverse Text Generator
Backwards text
Backwards text simply lists the characters in reverse order. The tricky part is deciding what a character is: an emoji with a skin tone or a letter with an accent can be made of several code points. A good tool keeps those together, otherwise the result shows broken symbols.
Upside-down text
Unicode contains letters from phonetic alphabets and other scripts that happen to look like Latin letters turned over, such as ɐ, ǝ and ʎ. Replacing each letter with its look-alike and reversing the order gives text that reads upside down.
Mirror text
Mirror text swaps letters for characters that look horizontally flipped, such as b and d or the Cyrillic Я for R, and reverses the order. Leonardo da Vinci wrote many of his notes in mirror writing, which can be read with a mirror.
Where to use it, and where not
- Good for: usernames, bios, jokes, puzzles, games and eye-catching posts.
- Avoid for: names, addresses, links, passwords and anything people must search for or copy correctly.
- Screen readers read look-alike characters as other letters or skip them, so keep the important message in normal text too.