Upside-Down Text

How to flip text upside down

1. Type or paste your text in the input box. The result appears as you type.
2. Under Transformation, choose: - Upside down (rotate 180°): each character is replaced by a look-alike that appears turned over, and the order is reversed, so the text reads correctly when you turn your screen around; - Upside-down letters, same order: the letters are turned over but stay in reading order; - Mirror writing (reflect left to right): the order is reversed and letters that have a reflected look-alike are swapped (b ↔ d, R → Я, N → И, ? → ⸮), as if the text were seen in a mirror.
3. For several lines in upside-down mode, keep Also reverse the order of the lines ticked to rotate the whole block, as if it were printed on a card turned over. A mirror keeps the lines in their order.
4. Click Copy. Flip text refreshes the result, and Use the result as input puts it back in the input box, which is handy to check that flipping twice gives your original text.

How it works

Unicode has no “rotate” instruction for plain text. The trick is to find, for each character, another character that looks like it turned 180°: “a” becomes “ɐ” (a phonetic letter), “e” becomes “ǝ”, “h” becomes “ɥ”, “!” becomes “¡”. Some letters are their own upside-down version (o, s, x, z, H, I, N, O, S, X, Z), and some simply swap with each other: b ↔ q, d ↔ p, n ↔ u, M ↔ W, 6 ↔ 9. Rotating a line also means reading it from the end, which is why the order is reversed.

The table in this tool covers a–z, A–Z, 0–9 and common punctuation: . , ’ ” ! ? ( ) [ ] { } < > _ & ; « » and a few more. It works in both directions: pasting upside-down text and flipping it again gives back the original letters.

Accented letters keep their accent, moved to the other side of the letter: é becomes ǝ with an acute accent below, ç becomes ɔ with a mark above. Emoji and letters of other alphabets stay whole; a line under the result lists any characters that have no look-alike and were kept unchanged.

Limits worth knowing

• The capitals are the weak point. Several of them (ꓭ for B, ꓷ for D, ꓘ for K) come from the Lisu script and may be missing from older fonts, which then show a box. Lowercase text looks more convincing on most devices.
• Some look-alikes are approximations: ᄅ for 2 and ㄣ for 4 are Korean and Chinese phonetic characters; Ɛ for 3 is an African Latin letter.
• Screen readers read these characters as foreign letters or symbols, and search engines do not match them to normal words. Use upside-down text for fun, not for information people need.
• Mirror writing is only partial. Unicode has reflected forms for some letters (ɒ, ɘ, ɿ, ƨ, Ǝ, ꟻ, ⅃, Я, И, ꟼ) and many letters are symmetric anyway (A, H, M, O, T, U, V, W, X, Y, o, v, w, x), but there is no mirrored g, k, y, 2, 4 or 7, among others. These are kept and listed under the result. Accents are reflected too: é becomes ɘ with a grave accent.