Reverse text

Reversing a line of text three different ways

Asking for text backwards is ambiguous, and which answer you want depends entirely on why you asked. The tool offers all three rather than guessing and giving you a result that looks broken.

1. 1Paste the text and pick the mode. Characters, words and lines are genuinely different operations, not settings on one operation.
2. 2Choose characters to spell the whole thing backwards, which is the reading puzzle and the novelty use.
3. 3Choose words to keep every word readable and only flip their order, which is what people usually want for a caption.
4. 4Choose lines to reverse a list or a set of paragraphs top to bottom while leaving each line exactly as it was.
5. 5Copy the result. It is ordinary text, so it pastes anywhere without formatting attached and can be reversed back by running it through again.

Three operations that all get called reversing

The distinction is worth ten seconds because picking the wrong one produces output that is technically correct and useless for what you were doing.

• Character reversal turns "social media" into "aidem laicos". Nothing is readable, which is the point when it is a puzzle or a hidden message.
• Word reversal turns "social media" into "media social". Every word is still a word, and the sentence reads as an inversion rather than as gibberish.
• Line reversal leaves every line untouched and flips their order, which is how you invert a ranked list or a chronological set of notes.
• Word reversal here preserves the whitespace between words, so double spaces and indentation survive rather than being normalised away.
• Line reversal preserves blank lines too, so the paragraph structure of the original is still there at the end.
• None of these is mirror text, which is a different thing entirely and is covered below.

Why most reversers break emoji, and this one does not

This is the page in the family with a genuine correctness claim behind it, and it is easy to check: paste a family emoji into any other reverser and watch what comes back.

• The naive implementation is to split the string into an array and reverse it, which walks UTF-16 code units and takes emoji apart at the seams.
• A flag is two regional indicator letters. Reversed by code unit it becomes a different flag, or two letters in a box, which is a visible failure.
• A family emoji is several people joined by invisible characters. Reversed carelessly it comes back as a row of separate people in the wrong order.
• An accented letter written as a base letter plus a combining mark moves the accent onto whichever letter now precedes it, so cafe with an acute becomes something no language has.
• This tool segments the text into grapheme clusters first, the unit a reader calls a character, then reverses those clusters, so each one arrives intact.
• Where a browser has no segmenter it falls back to code points, which still keeps ordinary emoji whole even though multi-part sequences may split.

Reversed text is not mirrored text

A steady share of people looking for backwards text want writing that reads correctly in a mirror, which is a different problem with a different answer. Knowing which one you need saves a lot of pasting.

• Reversed text changes the order of the characters. Mirror text keeps the order and replaces each letter with a glyph that is its mirror image.
• Unicode has no mirrored alphabet, so mirror generators substitute lookalike characters borrowed from other scripts, and support is patchy.
• Those substitutions are why mirror text often arrives as boxes on a phone while looking fine on the desktop it was made on.
• Right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew are already stored in logical order and displayed right to left, so reversing them produces nonsense rather than a mirror.
• For a genuinely mirrored look, a CSS transform or an image is the correct tool, because it flips the rendering rather than substituting the characters.
• For decorative lettering that still copies and pastes as text, a font generator is the tool that does that job properly.