Zalgo
The text that appears to glitch.
Where it came from
Zalgo text is the Internet's "corrupted" aesthetic: characters draped in cascading diacritics, as if possessed. The name comes from "Zalgo," a creepypasta meme of an eldritch force that breaks reality.
Technically it is just Unicode combining marks piled on a base letter. The effect is pure styling — no data is actually lost.
How it works
Unicode lets you attach many combining marks (U+0300–U+036F) to one character; stacking dozens makes glyphs smear upward and downward. Rendering depends on the font.
UWC adds Zalgo for fun and strips it back to clean text — the marks are just zero-width decorations. All in your browser.