Strikethrough on Facebook: Jokes, Corrections and Price Drops

A line through a word says two things at once: here is what I first wrote, and here is what I mean now. That double message is why strikethrough turns up so often on Facebook, from jokes like d̶i̶e̶t̶ s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶s̶ M̶o̶n̶d̶a̶y̶ pizza night to shop posts that show an old price next to a new one. Facebook posts don’t come with a strikethrough button, but you can paste the line in.

How the line gets there

Unlike bold or italic, strikethrough doesn’t swap your letters for new ones. It adds a combining mark, a tiny character with no width of its own that draws a stroke across the character before it. Put one after every character and you get a continuous line. Because the marks attach to whatever comes before them, they work on accented letters, symbols and numbers as well: W̶a̶s̶ $̶4̶0̶. Spaces are left alone, so each word gets its own stretch of line, which keeps longer phrases a little easier to read.

Three ways to use it

• The joke. Cross out what you’re supposed to do and leave what you’re really doing: g̶o̶ t̶o̶ b̶e̶d̶ e̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ one more episode.
• The honest correction. If you got a detail wrong, strike the old value and add the right one in plain text right after it, so people who saw the first version understand what changed: meeting at 3̶ p̶m̶ 4 pm.
• The price drop. In a sale post, cross out the old price and keep the new one plain: $̶4̶0̶ $25. Only do this with a price you really charged before.

Step by step

1. Type only the words you want crossed out into the box on our generator.
2. Find the strikethrough styles. The standard version draws one long line, the short version usually leaves small gaps between letters, and the tilde version is wavy.
3. Press Copy on the style you want.
4. In Facebook, paste the struck text into your post or comment.
5. Type the rest of the sentence, including the replacement, in normal text.

Not sure which line looks best? The strikethrough page shows every variant with your own words, so you can compare them before you copy. Changed your mind later? Paste the struck text into the unstyle tool and the lines come off again.

For a shop post, put the struck price and the new price side by side on the same line, so nobody has to work out which number applies. Customers often compare a few listings quickly, and a clear old-new pair answers their first question at a glance.

Things to keep in mind

• Each character carries an extra mark, so a struck word uses about twice as many characters as the plain word. Short phrases work best.
• Depending on the device, the line can sit a little high or low, and some fonts draw it faintly.
• Screen readers may read the marks aloud or skip the word entirely. That’s fine for a joke, but never strike the only copy of information people need.
• Search may not match struck words with their plain spelling, so keep product names and new prices unstruck.

Strike only the words that changed, not the whole sentence. A short struck phrase next to a plain correction is much easier to read than a line through everything.