Turn your world upside-down with Unicode

When I was a kid I used to like to put numbers into the calculator – they had just been invented – and see what words I could make. Pretty quickly I discovered that 7734 spelled hell when you turned the calculator upside down. But hell is a bad word so I figured out that if you used the decimal point you could spell hello. Cool! Now I can show my parents this cool trick. 5 minutes later we discovered that 77345 spelled shell. I’m sure you’ve all played the game. Well, enter the 2007 version of that same game.

The trick is really pretty cool. I first saw it several days ago in r3v‘s IM status message. This web site takes a text string and turns it upside down, using some idiosyncrasies in the character encoding standard – Unicode – used by most computers today. The results can be copied and pasted into email, web sites, iChat status messages and the like. Some phrases work better than others. Some characters don’t really have a suitable upside down substitutes. It is fun to play with various phrases and see how they come out.

ɐɥolɐ

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[posted with ecto]

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