Reverse text, words or lines

Three ways to turn text around

Reverse the letters treats the selection as one string, so in a text of several lines the last line comes out first, each one mirrored. Reverse the words works line by line: each line keeps its place and its words swap ends, with punctuation staying attached to its word. Reverse the order of lines leaves every line as it is and only flips their order.

All three stay inside the selection when there is one. Select a single word in a sentence and only that word is mirrored; select ten lines in the middle of a long list and only those ten swap places, while everything around them stays put.

What reversing is good for

• Lists in the wrong order. Chat exports, logs and feeds often run newest first; Reverse the order of lines puts them oldest first. It also turns a top-ten list into a countdown.
• Steps to retrace. Notes taken while taking something apart, reversed, become the order for putting it back together.
• Names one per line. For two-word names, Reverse the words turns “Lovelace Ada” into “Ada Lovelace” on every line at once.
• Puzzles and games. Hide a quiz answer, write a backwards clue for a treasure hunt, or play with word pairs like stressed and desserts.
• Proofreading. Reading a text backwards, word by word, stops your eye from skimming ahead, an old trick for catching spelling mistakes.
• Checking palindromes. Make a phrase lower case, remove its spaces and punctuation, copy it onto the next line and reverse that line: if both lines match, it reads the same both ways.

Combining the three

Reverse the letters, then Reverse the order of lines, and every line is mirrored but stays in its own place: “abc” over “def” becomes “cba” over “fed”. Running the same reverse twice gives back the text you started with, so there is no harm in trying. The Case menu joins in as well: reverse “Anna” to annA, choose Sentence case, and it reads Anna again.

Reversing also works with the rest of the Lines menu. After flipping a list, number the lines to make a countdown, or sort it when you want an order by content rather than position: Z to A sorts the text from the end of the alphabet, while Reverse the order of lines only turns your current order around.

Limits worth knowing

Text Studio reverses the order of characters; it does not turn letters upside down or mirror their shapes. The upside-down text you see on social media is built from look-alike characters taken from other alphabets and symbol sets, which Text Studio does not make.

Characters made of more than one piece stay whole: a letter stored with a separate accent mark keeps its accent, and an emoji built from several parts, such as a skin tone, a family or a flag, moves as one. Text Studio reverses what you see as one character, not the bytes behind it.

Digits are characters like any other, so 2026 becomes 6202 and a phone number turns into nonsense. There is no setting that keeps numbers or whole words intact while the letters flip; select around them if they must stay readable.

Text for an iron-on transfer, or a sign meant to be read in a mirror, needs the shapes of the letters flipped as well as their order. That is a job for the mirror option many printer dialogs offer for transfer paper, or for a flip command in a picture editor, such as Flip canvas horizontal in Octoolo's Photo Editor.