Reverse Text Generator

Reversing by hand is slow and easy to get wrong. The tool does it as soon as you paste.

1. Type or paste your text into the Input box. It can be one word, a paragraph or a long list.
2. Open the Reverse menu and pick Every character, Word order, Letters inside each word or Line order. The first of these is the default.
3. Read the result in the output box. It refreshes whenever you type or change the menu.
4. Press Copy or Download .txt, or press Use as input to feed the result back in and apply another option to it.

A multi-line example shows the difference. Take three lines: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Line order returns Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday and leaves each word spelled normally. Every character keeps the lines in their original order but spells each one backwards, giving yadnoM, yadseuT and yadsendeW. Choosing Word order on a two-word name such as Ada Lovelace returns Lovelace Ada, a quick way to swap the order of a short name list.

The four options give very different results from the same sentence. Here they are applied to Hello, world! on one line.

Two details are worth knowing. Every character works line by line, so one two over three four becomes owt eno over ruof eerht, with the lines in their original order. Word order splits each line on spaces and joins it with single spaces, so a run of several spaces collapses to one.

Punctuation has no special status in any of the options. Because a comma or full stop is attached to the word beside it, it travels with that word when the words move and gets reversed with it when the letters do. If you want the punctuation to stay put, remove it first or accept that it will move. Carriage returns are also removed by Line order, which converts Windows line endings into plain ones.

The tool reverses text one Unicode code point at a time, not one visible symbol at a time. Plain letters, digits and precomposed accented letters such as the single character é are safe. Some symbols are built from several code points, and those can come out wrong. A flag emoji is two regional indicator letters, so reversing the United Kingdom flag gives the Bulgarian one. An accent typed as a separate combining mark detaches and lands on the wrong letter. Check any emoji or accented text after reversing it. Typing accents as single precomposed characters, which is what most keyboards produce by default, keeps each one on the correct letter.

Applying the same option twice restores the original, apart from the collapsed spaces mentioned above. That is also the quickest check for a palindrome: reverse a word such as level and compare. For phrases, remove the spaces and punctuation first with the whitespace remover.

• Lists. Line order turns an oldest-first list into newest-first. Pair it with the alphabetical order tool when you need a sorted list the other way round.
• Puzzles. A backwards sentence is a simple code that children can decode by eye.
• Programming practice. Reversing a string is a classic exercise, and this gives you the expected output to compare with.

For letters that also face the other way, try the mirror text generator.