How to make strikethrough text on iPhone
Notes has a real strikethrough button that stays inside Notes. Everywhere else — Messages, Instagram, WhatsApp — it has to be built out of a Unicode combining mark instead, which behaves differently when you edit or send it.
There is exactly one place on an iPhone with a real strikethrough button, and it is usually not the one you need when this comes up. Crossing out a joke in a message, the old price in a marketplace listing, or a finished item in a caption goes a completely different way, and understanding that difference also explains why deleting the result sometimes takes an extra tap.
The one native button: Notes
Open Notes, select some text, and tap the Aa formatting icon above the keyboard. Alongside Title, Heading and Body you will find character styles — Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough among them. Tap it and the selected text gets a real line drawn through it, stored as formatting attached to that text, the same idea as bold in a word processor.
That formatting belongs to the note. Copy the struck-through sentence out of Notes and paste it into Messages, Instagram or an email, and in most cases the strike does not survive the trip — only the plain words arrive. The style was never part of the text itself; it was a property Notes kept alongside it.
Why Messages, Instagram and WhatsApp do not have the same button
None of them store rich text. A message, a caption, a bio field is a string of characters and nothing else — there is no separate layer for “this part is struck through” the way a note or a Pages document has one. So if a strikethrough is going to survive being typed into one of these apps, it cannot be a style. It has to be built out of the characters themselves.
How the Unicode version works
Unicode has a character called COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY. On its own it does nothing — it is designed to attach to whatever character comes before it and draw a line across it. A strikethrough generator, or a keyboard with a strikethrough style, walks through the text you typed and inserts a copy of that character after every single letter, so “cancelled” struck through is really eighteen characters long for nine you can see: one combining mark riding on each letter.
That is a different mechanism from bold or italic fancy text, which substitutes each letter for a separate look-alike character and therefore runs out of letters in places — small caps has no Q, for instance. A combining mark has nothing to run out of. It attaches to any character at all: accented letters, digits, punctuation, even an emoji, which is why strikethrough does not have the same gaps other fancy styles do.
What that costs you
- Length — every visible character is really two, so a caption with a strict character limit fills up roughly twice as fast as the same words in plain text.
- Editing — because a struck-through letter is a base character plus a separate combining mark, backspace does not always remove both in one tap. Some apps peel the stroke off first and leave the bare letter; others take both together. It depends on how that particular app groups characters, not on anything you did wrong.
- Delivery — piling up combining marks is also how “glitch” or zalgo-style text is produced, and a few platforms filter or trim runs of them. A strikethrough sentence that looks right on your own screen can occasionally arrive shortened or stripped somewhere else.
- Screen readers — most do not announce the stroke at all. They read the letters and skip the combining mark, so the “crossed out” meaning is visual only. If the meaning matters — a corrected price, a joke that depends on the reader seeing what was crossed out — it is worth leaving the plain word nearby too.
Where Kibo fits
Kibo carries Strikethrough as one of its fancy text styles, applied as you type rather than through a separate web generator you copy from. It sits alongside Bold, Italic, Script, Circled and the rest, and like the other 11, it works with Full Access left off.
Frequently asked questions
Does Unicode strikethrough work in Instagram bios, TikTok captions and WhatsApp?
Yes — because it is built out of ordinary characters rather than a formatting style, it travels anywhere plain text does. That is the opposite of the strikethrough inside the Notes app, which is real formatting and stays inside Notes unless the app you paste it into also happens to read rich text.
Why does deleting struck-through text sometimes take two backspaces per letter?
Each struck-through letter is actually two separate characters — the letter itself and a combining mark drawn across it. Depending on how an app groups characters for editing, backspace can remove them together or one at a time, which is why it occasionally feels like the stroke and the letter are being deleted separately.
Is there any native strikethrough option outside the Notes app?
A few first-party apps with real document formatting — Pages is the obvious one — offer it too, but the same limit applies: it is formatting attached to that document, not to the text itself, so it does not carry over once the words are copied into a plain-text field like Messages or a social app.
Try it on your own keyboard
Kibo is a free custom keyboard for iPhone with real mechanical key sounds, a wardrobe of themes and RGB backlight effects. No account, no ads, and it works with Full Access left off.