Zalgo text works by stacking Unicode combining marks, special characters designed to attach above, through, or below whichever letter comes before them, from three separate ranges, then piling a random handful from each range onto every character in your text. The more marks stacked per letter, the more "corrupted" and chaotic the result looks, which is why this tool exposes an intensity slider rather than a single fixed effect. Because the marks are chosen randomly, no two generations look identical, and very high intensities can make text slow to render or hard for some apps and moderation filters to handle gracefully.
The combining marks are picked at random from a pool for each character, so retyping or hitting Reshuffle gives you a different, equally valid glitch pattern rather than one fixed result.
Many sites cap how many combining marks can follow a single character specifically to prevent abuse from extreme Zalgo text, so pasting a very high-intensity version somewhere may get it trimmed automatically.
Mostly, yes, running Zalgo text through our Unicode to Text Converter strips the combining marks back out, leaving the original letters, though extremely dense combinations can occasionally leave a stray mark behind.