Mirror & Reverse Text

Two modes

Reverse writes your text back to front and nothing else. Every character, including spaces, punctuation and line breaks, keeps its normal shape; only the order changes. It is the useful mode for practical jobs: checking whether a word is a palindrome, writing a backwards clue for a puzzle, or undoing text that was pasted in reversed.

Mirror reverses the text the same way and then replaces letters that have a reversed twin. Four lowercase letters swap with each other because they are already mirror images: b↔d and p↔q. The rest come from other parts of Unicode, because the Latin alphabet in Unicode has no full set of reversed letters:

• e → ɘ (U+0258, reversed e from the IPA block) and r → ɿ (U+027F, reversed fishhook r)
• s → ƨ and S → Ƨ (Latin tone-two letters, U+01A8 and U+01A7)
• F → ꟻ and P → ꟼ (Latin Epigraphic reversed F and P, U+A7FB and U+A7FC). Lowercase f also becomes the capital ꟻ, since there is no small reversed f.
• L → ⅃ (U+2143, reversed sans-serif capital L) and R → Я (Cyrillic Ya, U+042F)
• J → Ⴑ (a Georgian letter, U+10B1) and c → ɔ, C → Ɔ (open o)

Everything else passes through unchanged. The note under the result in Mirror mode says this too: not every letter has a true mirrored glyph.

Worked examples

These are the tool's actual outputs:

• stressed → Reverse: desserts. Mirror: bɘƨƨɘɿƚƨ.
• hello world → Reverse: dlrow olleh. Mirror: blɿow ollɘh.
• Press Start → Reverse: tratS sserP. Mirror: ƚɿaƚƧ ƨƨɘɿꟼ.

In the last one, notice the a in "Start": it has no mirrored form, so it stays a normal a in the middle of the flipped letters. The capital S at the start of "Start" became Ƨ and the P of "Press" became ꟼ, now at the end.

Limits worth knowing

• The reversal works one Unicode code point at a time, not one visible character at a time, so flags, skin-tone and family emoji, and separately typed combining accents get rearranged (see the emoji question in the FAQ below).
• Multi-line text reverses as one string, so the last line comes first and each line also reads backwards.
• Mirror output is decoration. Screen readers read Я, Ⴑ and ꟻ as the letters they really are, and search engines will not match the mirrored word to the original.
• There is no upload and no server step. The transforms are a few lines of JavaScript, and they keep working offline once the page is open.

Related tools

To rotate text 180 degrees instead of reflecting it, use the Upside-Down Text generator. For styled Unicode letters, see the Fancy Text Generator, and paste any mirrored result into the Unicode Inspector to see exactly which characters it contains. The post Fancy fonts aren't fonts covers where these borrowed letters come from.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between reverse text and mirror text?

Reverse only changes the order of the characters: "hello world" becomes "dlrow olleh", with every letter still facing the normal way. Mirror also reverses the order, and then replaces letters that have a reversed look-alike in Unicode, so "hello world" becomes "blɿow ollɘh". Mirror is closer to what you would see in a mirror; reverse is what you want for backwards-spelling puzzles and palindrome checks.

Why are only some letters flipped in Mirror mode?

Unicode has no complete set of mirrored Latin letters. The tool swaps b and d, p and q, and uses borrowed characters for c, e, f, j, r, s, t, z and the capitals C, E, F, J, L, P, R, S and Z. Every other letter, such as a, g, k or N, has no usable mirrored form and is left as it is. Symmetric letters like o, x, A, H and O look the same in a mirror anyway.

Can I type mirror writing that reads correctly in a real mirror?

Roughly, yes. Hold the screen up to a mirror and the reversed order plus the flipped b/d, p/q, e, r, s and similar letters will read left to right. Letters without a mirrored version, like k, a or g, will look backwards in the reflection. For a true mirror image of a sign or a T-shirt print, flip an image of the text horizontally instead.

Does reversing text work for emoji and accented letters?

Single-code-point characters are fine: é typed on a normal keyboard, Chinese characters, and emoji like 😀 reverse cleanly. Characters built from several code points do not. A flag emoji is two letters internally, so 🇺🇸 reverses to 🇸🇺, and skin-tone or family emoji fall apart into their parts.

Is Я a mirrored R?

It looks like one but it is the Cyrillic letter Ya (U+042F), a real letter in Russian and other languages. The tool uses it because Unicode has no reversed Latin capital R. Someone reading Cyrillic will see a different letter, and a screen reader may pronounce it as Ya.