How to type upside-down (ǝlqᴉssod s,ʇᴉ ʍoɥ puɐ)
˙ƃuᴉɹoq ˙˙˙sʇǝƃ ʇsnɾ uosɹǝd lɐɯɹou ɐ ǝʞᴉl ƃuᴉdʎʇ 'sǝɯᴉʇǝɯoS
Or, if you don't feel like flipping over your phone, craning your neck, or staring at the above sentence until your eyes adjust: Sometimes, typing like a normal person just gets... boring.
So why not flip the world on its head and turn things upside down?
We've all had that one friend on social media who posted status after status in the mirrored text, forcing us to linger on their post for a second or two longer than usual in order to parse out -- just like I did in the tweet below. It can be a cool trick, and much less grating with a Very Good doggo GIF to go along with it.
Or you can use it to frighten your coworkers into submission over Slack.
pɐǝɥ ɹᴉǝɥʇ uo spɹoʍ ɹnoʎ dᴉlℲ
So how do you flip text on your own? You don't -- not exactly, anyhow. You'll need to head to any of several online conversion programs, like TypeUpsideDown or txtn, among others, while apps available for iOS and Android both do essentially the same thing. To show you how this works, I'm going to use Upside Down Text, which includes a substantial FAQ page that explains how the process works (more on that in below), something the other barebones portals leave out.
Just go to one of the pages and type your message into the convertor tool.
Once your message is converted, just cut and paste to your platform of choice. It's that simple. Just about everything should work -- even iMessage is supported.
We now know how we to flip our words upside down using we conversion tools -- but how exactly is that possible?
It's all in the Unicode
These programs work so easily and universally across platforms because they're built around Unicode, the computing industry's standard for converting text characters from code (for some extra insight into how the Unicode Consortium works, this explainer about emoji might help to shed some light). Each individual figure is represented by a unique character code, which can be translated across languages on various computer platforms.
The inverted text generators change the words we type into the field backwards by converting them into the appropriate Unicode character codes, which you can see in the field in the image below.
Ⓣⓗⓔ ⓢⓐⓜⓔ ⓢⓔⓣⓤⓟ ⓛⓔⓣⓢ ⓨⓞⓤ ⓣⓨⓟⓔ ⓘⓝ ⓑⓤⓑⓑⓛⓔⓢ, ⓣⓞⓞ. Just check out this similar conversion tool.
You might run into a few inconsistencies with your flipped alphabet where the existing Unicode symbol doesn't quite perfectly mesh with the rest of the letters -- just look at the "T" above -- but you'll still be able to get your point across, more or less.
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
