Two kinds of flipped text
- Mirror text is what you would see in a mirror. The order of the letters is reversed, and letters that have a mirror image, such as b and d, are swapped, or replaced with look-alike characters, so that the result reads as a reflection.
- Upside down text is the text turned around by half a turn. The order is reversed and each letter is replaced by the character that looks like it turned over, as in the word hello shown as ollǝɥ.
It is made of real characters
Computers cannot flip text, so the tool uses characters from the Unicode standard that happen to look like turned or reversed letters, for example ɐ, ǝ, ɔ and ɘ. They can be copied and pasted into messages, posts, bios and names, and they survive where formatting does not.
Limits to know about
- Not every letter has a good look-alike. Characters that have none stay as they are.
- Some letters are shown with characters from other alphabets, and how they look depends on the font of the app that shows them. A very few apps may show an empty box for some characters.
- Screen readers read these characters by their own names, so the text is hard to follow for people who use them. Do not use flipped text for anything important.
- The letters ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, the numbers and the common punctuation are covered by the upside down mode. Mirror text covers fewer letters, because fewer of them have a mirror twin.
The preview and the CSS way
The preview below the result shows your text flipped by the browser, as a real reflection. On your own website you can do the same without special characters, with a line of CSS. The text stays normal text, so it can still be read by search engines and screen readers.
.mirror { display: inline-block; transform: scaleX(-1); }
.upside { display: inline-block; transform: rotate(180deg); }Several lines
Mirror text is made line by line, because a mirror does not change the order of the lines. Upside down text turns the whole block, so the last line ends up at the top, unless you tick Reverse each line separately.
For plain backwards text, use reverse letters, and for every mode together, reverse text. To reverse the order of the words, see reverse words.