Discord Text Formatter — Strikethrough, Spoiler, Bold, Markdown

Discord supports a slim subset of Markdown for inline emphasis. Bold is two asterisks (**text**). Italic is one asterisk or one underscore. Strikethrough is two tildes (~~text~~). Spoiler is two pipes (||text||). Underline is two underscores (__text__). Inline code is single backticks. Code blocks are triple backticks with an optional language hint. Blockquotes are line-prefixed with >. Headers use one, two, or three leading hashes. The toolbar above wraps your selection in the right token so you never have to remember which character pairs with which format.

Strikethrough, spoiler, bold — the three most-asked syntaxes

Three Discord formatting questions hit Google more than 30,000 times every month combined, so they earn their own short paragraph. Strikethrough wraps any inline text in two tildes on each side: ~~outdated~~. The closing pair must sit on the same line; a line break in the middle breaks the parser and the tildes render literally. Spoiler uses two pipes: ||hidden||. Discord paints the block out as a black bar and reveals it when a viewer clicks. Bold wraps in two asterisks: **bold**. A single asterisk is italic. Three asterisks combine: ***both*** renders bold-italic. The B, S, and Spoiler toolbar buttons above each emit the matching token pair around the current selection.

Small text, fancy fonts, and the Unicode trick

Discord does not have a native small-text formatter. The "small text" you see in popular posts is a Unicode alphabet — separate codepoints that just happen to look like small capital letters. Switch to the Fancy text tab and you get eight of them: small-caps (ᴀʙᴄ), bold-sans (𝗮𝗯𝗰), italic-sans (𝘢𝘣𝘤), monospace (𝚊𝚋𝚌), double-struck (𝕒𝕓𝕔), bold-script (𝓪𝓫𝓬), fullwidth (ａｂｃ), and spaced (a b c). Each alphabet has its own copy-to-clipboard button. Paste the output into a message or channel topic — Discord renders the codepoints directly. Important caveat: Discord blocks most decorative Unicode in usernames as part of impersonation prevention. Bios accept everything, with a 190-char ceiling.

Discord 2,000 vs 4,000 character cap

Free accounts post messages up to 2,000 characters. Nitro accounts post up to 4,000 — the ceiling moved from 2,000 to 4,000 in 2021, giving Nitro users more room for long-form announcements. The character counter on this tool tracks both: green under 2,000, amber between 2,000 and 4,000 ("Nitro-only"), red over 4,000. Server announcements and forum-channel posts share the same cap. If you regularly publish patch notes or stream-recap posts in Discord, drafting them here is faster than discovering halfway through a paste that the 2,000-char ceiling cuts your post mid-sentence.

Templates that actually save time

Six pre-loaded templates cover the cases creators paste most often. The spoiler-reveal drops a boss-fight teaser inside a black bar so viewers click through to read it. The sale strikethrough crosses out an old price next to the new one — exactly the pattern Twitch and Kick streamers use for limited-time merch drops. The code-block template ships a chat-command cheatsheet ready to paste into a #commands channel. The quote-plus-link works for VOD pull-quotes. The agenda-headers template fits a 5-block weekly schedule into Discord's three-tier header system. And the 190-char bio packs a streamer profile inside Discord's hard bio limit so you don't have to count characters by hand.

Markdown the toolbar does not handle (and why)

Discord supports a few formatting tricks the toolbar above intentionally skips. Subtext (-# prefix) renders in a smaller dimmed font but only on the desktop client in 2026; mobile clients render the prefix literally. Lists (- item or 1. item) work but most streamer messages do not need them — bullet points outside a long announcement read as filler. Spoiler-image attachments are a separate feature triggered by the SPOILER: filename prefix, not a markdown token. And custom-emoji IDs (<:name:1234>) require knowing the emoji's snowflake ID — outside the scope of a markdown editor. If you need a Discord ID lookup, our free Discord ID lookup decodes the snowflake without an API token. For Twitch, sister tools cover emote sizing and panel cropping in the same way this page handles markdown.