Upside Down Text Generator

Six phrases, turned over

Each of these was flipped by this tool when the page was built. Turn your phone upside down and they read normally.

• Hello world plɹoʍ ollǝH
• Happy birthday! ¡ʎɐpɥʇɹᴉq ʎddɐH
• What are you looking at? ¿ʇɐ ƃuᴉʞool noʎ ǝɹɐ ʇɐɥM
• Greetings from Australia ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ ɯoɹɟ sƃuᴉʇǝǝɹ⅁
• Café, señor? ¿ɹoṵǝs 'ǝ̗ɟɐƆ
• Answers on page 42 ᄅㄣ ǝƃɐd uo sɹǝʍsu∀

How text turns upside down

There is no "rotate" instruction in Unicode, and no way for plain text to carry one. A web page can spin a paragraph with a line of CSS, but the moment you copy it the rotation is gone, because the letters themselves never changed.

So upside-down text is built from substitutes. For every letter, there is a different character somewhere in Unicode that happens to look like that letter turned over: a becomes ɐ, e becomes ǝ, h becomes ɥ. Some letters are each other's rotation already — b and q, d and p, n and u — and a few, such as o, s, x and z, look the same either way up.

Then the order is reversed. Picture a line of text on a card and turn the card over top-to-bottom: the last letter is now on the left. Substituting letters without reversing them gives you something that reads backwards once your reader has turned their phone round, which is the most common fault in quickly made flip tools.

Where the upside-down letters come from

Most of the lowercase set is borrowed from the International Phonetic Alphabet, and that is not a coincidence. When nineteenth-century phoneticians needed more symbols than the Latin alphabet offered, the cheapest way to get a new letter was to take an existing piece of metal type and set it upside down. A printer already owned it; nothing had to be cut or cast.

That is why the phonetic alphabet is full of "turned" letters, and why they are named that way in Unicode: ɐ is LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED A, ɥ is TURNED H, ɯ is TURNED M, ʇ is TURNED T. Each one stands for a particular sound — ɹ, the turned r, is how phoneticians write the r in most English accents — and each was encoded so linguists could write those sounds down. Upside-down text is a happy side effect of that work.

Because they are ordinary Latin letters used in real transcription, the lowercase replacements ship in nearly every system font. Lowercase upside-down text is about as safe to paste as styled text gets.

The capitals are borrowed from everywhere

Phonetics never needed turned capitals, so there is no tidy set of them. The tool uses the closest shapes it can find, and the sources are a small tour of Unicode:

Letter	Turned	Where the character really comes from
A	∀	Logic: the symbol for "for all", chosen as a turned A in the 1930s to pair with ∃, "there exists".
F	Ⅎ	One of three letters the Roman emperor Claudius added to the Latin alphabet, used for a w-like sound. It fell out of use after his reign.
G and Y	⅁ ⅄	Turned sans-serif capitals, encoded as mathematical symbols.
C	Ɔ	The open o of African orthographies and phonetics.
B and D	ᗺ ᗡ	Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, from the script used to write Carrier.
P	Ԁ	A Cyrillic letter from the old Komi alphabet.
T and U	⊥ ∩	Mathematical symbols: "perpendicular to" and set intersection.
V	Λ	Greek capital lambda.

Every one of those is a real character with a real job, borrowed for its shape. The catch is font coverage: a phone that has never needed Carrier syllabics may not have a font with ᗺ in it, and shows a box instead.

That is what the Lowercase first option is for. It lowercases your text before flipping, so every character comes from the well-supported phonetic set. You lose the capitals; in return, the text looks right on far more screens. For anything you are posting publicly, it is the safer choice.

Numbers, and Isaac Pitman's ten and eleven

Digits are where the approximation is most visible. A 6 and a 9 are each other's rotation, and 0 and 8 survive unchanged, but the rest are lookalikes from other scripts: the turned 4 is a Bopomofo letter, the turned 5 a Greek stigma.

Two exceptions exist. Isaac Pitman — better known for his shorthand — proposed a base-twelve number system with new digits for ten and eleven, and drew them as a turned 2 and a turned 3. Unicode added both in 2015 for people who write in base twelve, which makes ↊ and ↋ the only genuinely rotated digits there are. Tick Exact turned 2 and 3 to use them. They are new enough that many devices still lack a font for them, which is why the option is off by default.

Accents go underneath

Turn a page with é on it upside down and the accent ends up below the letter. Most flip tools ignore this and either drop the accent or leave it floating above, sometimes on the wrong letter entirely once the order is reversed.

Here the tool splits each accented letter into its base letter and its mark, flips the base, and swaps the mark for its below-the-line counterpart. An acute becomes an acute below; a tilde becomes a tilde below, which is how señor turns into a word with ṵ in it. The shapes are rotated rather than just moved, so a circumflex, which points up, becomes a caron underneath, which points down. And because letters are handled as whole units, reversing the line never pulls an accent onto its neighbour.

Reading upside-down text back

The other half of the tool goes the other way. Switch to Read upside-down text, paste in something flipped, and it comes back the right way up. Every character in the tables above is mapped back to its letter, along with the alternative characters other generators use — several sites take their capitals from the Lisu script, and those decode here too.

It also watches for mistakes. Paste flipped text into the normal box and the tool notices that most of the characters are already turned, and offers to read it instead of flipping it a second time.

One limitation is unavoidable. Capital K and lowercase k flip to the same character, so the decoder cannot tell which you started with and returns a lowercase k. If you flipped with Lowercase first ticked, the capitals were gone before flipping and cannot come back either.

Upside down, mirrored and backwards are three different things

The tool gives you all three at once, because people often mean one and ask for another.

• Upside down is a rotation through 180°. The line reads correctly when the screen is turned over.
• Mirrored is a reflection left to right, like writing seen in a mirror. The order reverses and each letter is swapped for a reversed form.
• Backwards keeps every letter as it is and reverses the order. Nothing is substituted, so it works anywhere and never shows a box.

Mirrored text is much patchier than upside-down text, and the reason is the same printing history. Phoneticians turned type over constantly; they rarely had a use for reversed letters. So e has a reversed form, ɘ, and s has a stand-in, but letters such as g, k and t have no mirror image at all. The tool lists the ones it could not mirror rather than quietly substituting something that merely looks odd.

Mirrored, with the gaps shown

• Hello world blɿow ollɘH
• Mirror, mirror ɿoɿɿim ⹁ɿoɿɿiM

Several lines at once

Turn a whole paragraph upside down and the line order flips too: the last line becomes the first. The tool does this by default, because it is what a real rotation looks like.

That is not always what you want. If you are flipping a list — a set of options, a column of names — tick Keep line order and each line flips in place, so the list still runs top to bottom.

Where upside-down text works

Comments, captions, bios, display names and chat messages generally accept it, since every character is an ordinary letter or symbol. Handles and usernames are another matter: most platforms restrict those to plain letters and digits, and will either reject the name or strip the characters out.

Two costs come with it, as with any styled text. Search will not find it, because ɐ is not a. And a screen reader reads out the substitute characters rather than the word you meant, so anything a blind reader needs to understand — a name, an instruction, a link — should stay the right way up.

Why people flip text

Puzzle books have printed their answers upside down for generations, at the foot of the page where you can check them without reading them by accident. Flipped text does the same job online: a spoiler, the punchline of a riddle, the answer to a quiz question.

It is also a long-running joke about Australia, a way to make a message stand out in a busy chat, and a small test of whether anyone is actually paying attention. All perfectly good reasons.

Related tools

The Fancy Text Generator has 58 styles including upside-down and mirrored side by side with bold, script and the rest. For text that looks broken on purpose, the Zalgo Text Generator piles marks above and below each letter. And the Name Scrambler rearranges the letters of a name into new orders and real anagrams.

Common questions

How do I type upside down?

You cannot do it from a keyboard, because no keyboard layout has these characters on it. Type normally into the box above and copy the upside-down version: every letter is swapped for a character that looks like it turned over, and the order is reversed so the line reads correctly when the screen is rotated.

How do I read upside-down text someone sent me?

Press Read upside-down text at the top of the tool and paste it in. It maps every character back and puts the order right. It also recognises the alternative characters other generators use, and if you paste flipped text into the normal box by mistake it notices and offers to read it instead.

Why does it reverse the order of the letters?

Because that is what turning a line through 180 degrees does. The last letter ends up at the far left, upside down. Flipping each letter without reversing gives you text that reads backwards once the screen is turned over. If you only want the letters reversed, without turning them, the Backwards result does exactly that.

Why do some capitals look wrong or show as boxes?

Lowercase letters flip into real Latin letters that are in almost every font. There is no such set for capitals, so they are borrowed from logic symbols, Canadian syllabics and other places, and some devices lack the fonts. Tick Lowercase first and everything flips into the well-supported lowercase set instead.

Can I use upside-down text in a username?

Usually not in the handle itself — most platforms restrict handles to plain letters, numbers and a few symbols. Display names, bios, captions and comments are far more forgiving. Bear in mind that nobody can search for a name written this way.

What happens to accents and numbers?

Accents move with their letter and end up underneath it, as they would if you turned the page over: é becomes a turned e with an acute below. Numbers flip using the closest available shapes, since Unicode only has genuinely rotated forms for 2 and 3; tick Exact turned 2 and 3 to use those.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. The flipping happens in your browser as you type. Nothing is uploaded or stored.