Discord Text Formatting Guide: Bold, Spoiler & Big Text

Discord text formatting runs on a lightweight version of Markdown — the same shorthand used on GitHub and Reddit. You type a few symbols around your words and Discord renders the style the moment the message posts.

The single most important rule: formatting only renders inside messages (and message-adjacent fields like embeds). It does not work in your username, nickname, or About Me bio — those stay plain text. For a styled name you need Unicode glyphs from a Discord font generator, not Markdown.

Everything below works with no Nitro on Discord desktop, the web app, and mobile. When you want the styled output without memorizing symbols, our Discord text formatting generator prints every style as a copy-paste card.

Bold is the most-requested style. To bold text in Discord, wrap the words in two asterisks on each side. Italics use one asterisk (or one underscore), and underline uses two underscores — a Discord extension that plain Markdown does not have.

You can stack them: two asterisks plus two underscores gives underlined bold, and three asterisks gives bold italic. The wrappers just nest.

• Bold: two asterisks around the words.
• Italic: one asterisk (or one underscore) around the words.
• Underline: two underscores around the words.
• Bold italic: three asterisks around the words.

To cross out text in Discord, wrap it in two tildes on each side. The tilde key (~) usually sits at the top-left of the keyboard, on the same key as the backtick.

Strikethrough is ideal for corrections, crossed-off checklist items, or a fake-dramatic edit — for example, striking out one word and following it with the real one.

• Type two tildes, your text, then two more tildes.

Spoiler tags black out text until a reader clicks it — this is how you hide text in Discord or censor text on Discord for plot twists, quiz answers, or sensitive words. Wrap the text in two vertical bars (pipes) on each side.

On desktop and web you can also select the text and click the eye / spoiler icon in the small formatting popup that appears above the selection. Readers then see a grey block that reveals on click.

• Type two pipes, your secret, then two more pipes.
• The pipe key is Shift + backslash on most keyboards.
• To hide an image instead of text, rename the file with a SPOILER_ prefix — see our spoiler image guide.

There is exactly one way to make text bigger in Discord: headers. Start a line with one, two, or three hash symbols followed by a space. One hash is the biggest; three is the smallest header size but still larger than normal chat text.

Headers must sit at the start of a line — you cannot enlarge a single word in the middle of a sentence. They are perfect for message titles, section breaks in long posts, and announcements.

• Biggest: one hash, a space, then your title.
• Medium: two hashes, a space, then your text.
• Small header: three hashes, a space, then your text (still bigger than the body).

The counterpart to headers is subtext, and it is the only way to make text smaller in Discord. Start a line with a hyphen, a hash, and a space (the -# prefix). Subtext renders in muted grey at a smaller size than normal chat text — ideal for footnotes, captions, disclaimers, and credits.

Like headers, subtext must begin a line and applies to the whole line, not a single word.

• Type a hyphen, then a hash, then a space, then your small text.

Beyond styling words, Discord Markdown structures whole blocks of a message:

• Inline code: wrap a snippet in single backticks for a monospace highlight.
• Code block: wrap several lines in triple backticks; add a language name after the opening backticks for colour syntax highlighting.
• Block quote: start a line with a greater-than sign and a space to quote one line; three of them quote everything that follows.
• Bullet list: start each line with a hyphen or asterisk and a space.
• Numbered list: start each line with a number, a dot, and a space.
• Masked link: [visible text](https://example.com) hides a long URL behind clickable text — but it only works inside embeds and some bot messages, not normal chat.

For a live side-by-side editor of all of these, use our Discord markdown previewer; for one-tap copyable style cards, use the text formatting generator.