Zalgo
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: zalgo
Etymology: Said to have been coined in 2004 by Dave “Shmorky” Kelly as the name of a mysterious malevolent entity appearing in webcomics and creepypasta.
Senses: examples: text: See also: heavy metal umlaut
text: > I've been wondering lately why more isn't done with Unicode-art. / > / the closest thing I can think to that is zalgo, which is more stupidity than art.
ref: 2010 June 14, oonh, “Re: (Futurist Comments) That was Then, This is Now”, in alt.gothic (Usenet), message-ID <nfohe7-48k.ln1@abyss.ninehells.com>:
text: i should also note that zalgo cannot be summoned on all operating systems / applications. i'm not sure of the exact requirements to make it render, but i'm sure someone smarter^([sic]) then me could answer.
ref: 2010 August 11, Marak Squires, “Re: [nodejs] [javasc]”, in nodejs (Google Groups), ID AANLkTinMAjt-HK75kBiJa84rmd3MXJAz_Wx4Lyct6+=U@mail.gmail.com:
text: Add support for Zalgo / The Linux kernel is woefully unprepared for the coming of Z҉A҉L҉G҉O̚̕̚ . T̀hi͘͡ş̸ p̸͏á̕t̢̕͢c̨̕h͟͟ ̴̧ą҉͘d͟͡d̢ş͡ s͏u̸͘p͠p̛͞͡o͟r̸t͜ ̷͟f̢͘͡o͜ŗ̛ ̴̧Z͝a҉lģ̡o͡ ̸t̕͞o̵͝ ̨k̶é͢r̶̨ne͘l҉҉̧ ͜m̶͞e̵s͘҉s̢̢͠a͠ǵ͟ę̸͞ ́oú͢͟tp̢̕͘u͞t͢ in order to ready those who will otherwise be ea͓̙ten at the arrival. Do n̹͝ot delͤ̀a̲̱͛y.
[Add support for Zalgo / The Linux kernel is woefully unprepared for the coming of ZALGO. This patch adds support for Zalgo to kernel message output in order to ready those who will otherwise be eaten at the arrival. Do not delay.]
ref: 2010 October 22, Matthew Garrett, “[PATCH] Add Zalgo support”, in fa.linux.kernel (Usenet), message-ID <fa.CpgkBfBod2+tK+RSA6JtXMFuaWY@ifi.uio.no>:
text: Ah, things get tricky here; Unicode is kind of a bear when you consider 'characters' because its codepoints aren't necessarily characters. An example would be the so-called "combining characters" which you can use for things like accents or ZALGO-text.
ref: 2013 March 16, Shark8, “Re: Is this expected behavior or not”, in comp.lang.ada (Usenet), message-ID <dfbf65c5-4f2e-4bb2-8b66-8db8ccb36d04@googlegroups.com>:
text: But Jake could still play around with Zalgo script, a type of programmable font that packed lots of digital bytes into each letter.
ref: 2013 August 4, Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous, Random House, →ISBN:
text: I'm not saying it isn't complicated; I'm saying that it could, and should, have been done better. Instead we get a bizarre Frankenstein's-monster of techniques where some character-glyphs are precomposed (with duplicates across multiple languages) and Zalgo-script is a thing. (see: https://eeemo.net/ )
ref: 2017 July 6, Shark8, “Re: GNAT vs UTF-8 source file names”, in comp.lang.ada (Usenet), message-ID <c65d0a6b-8dbb-4222-936f-838438e8d5bd@googlegroups.com>:
text: A single grapheme cluster is often one or two code points, but it can be a lot of code points in the case of something like Zalgo.
ref: 2017 October 10, Mike Ash, Matthew Elton, Gwynne Raskind, The Complete Friday Q&A, volume III, →ISBN:
text: I opened a file containing some zḁ̸̈̀l̷̠̹͊g̸̜͓͘ọ̷̰̝̆ te̸̘̋xṯ̸͒, [zalgo text] and vim crashed.
ref: 2019 August 5, Ben Kraft, “[vim/vim] Vim crashes on file with zalgo text when spellcheck is enabled (#4778)”, in vim_dev (Google Groups), ID vim/vim/issues/4778@github.com:
text: She hid the browser — let it spawn a thousand windows in the background for all she cared, her processor could handle it — and brought up the NASC++ chat window. Sure enough, Imperium had sent her a message; a string of random characters in ‘zalgo text’. Zalgo was a form of type that exploited Unicode, the international standard for rendering language characters, adding a kaleidoscope of dozens of diacritical marks above and below every character. […] Bridge recalled a story about one zalgo message that shut down a user’s online email account by overloading it with characters; […]
ref: 2020 May 25, Antony Johnston, The Tempus Project: The New Brigitte Sharp Thriller, →ISBN:
synonyms: glitch text
glosses: In full Zalgo text: text that appears corrupted or creepy due to the deliberate overuse of diacritics.