Discord Markdown Text Formatting: How to Bold, Italicize, Underline and Strikethrough Text

Discord has built-in support for Markdown formatting, which allows users to easily add formatting to their messages. Understanding how to properly format your text allows you to make your messages more effective and engaging. Here are the basics of Discord’s Markdown text formatting.

What Is Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to format plain text. It was created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004, with the goal of allowing people to write content for the web in a way that’s easy to read and write, while still allowing for basic formatting.

Markdown uses simple syntax, such as asterisks and underscores, to indicate formatting like bold, italic, and underline text, as well as headings, links, and lists. The resulting text can then be easily converted into HTML or other formats for publishing online.

Markdown has become widely popular due to its simplicity and ease of use. It’s not only supported by Discord (with some exceptions), but also by many apps and platforms, like Slack, GitHub, and Reddit.

Basic Markdown Text Formatting

Here are some of the more basic types of Markdown text formatting that you can use in Discord.

You can also combine different types of Markdown to format text in multiple types of ways. For example, you can both italicize and bold text at the same time by combining the two Markdown types, or by using a completely different Markdown.

Code Blocks Markdown Text Formatting

Discord also provides support for code blocks. You can wrap text to indicate to the reader that it’s code. To format text as code, add a backtick (`) to both sides of the text.

Here’s what it looks like after you send the message.

You can also format text as multiline code blocks, which is important when you’re wanting to show content such as API requests, responses, and so on.

To format text as multiline code, place three backticks (“`) above and below the text.

Here’s what that looks like after you send the message.

Block Quotes Markdown Text Formatting

Block quotes allow users to display a section of text as a separate block, set apart from the main body of text. Block quotes are typically used to indicate a quotation, a reference, or a highlighted section of text. In Markdown, block quotes are created by placing a greater-than sign (>), or three (>>>) at the beginning of each line of the quoted text, followed by a space.

This is what it looks like after it’s sent.

Which Markdown Isn’t Supported in Discord?

While Markdown offers robust support for basic formatting options like bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough text, as well as code blocks, inline code, tagging spoilers, and more, there are a few advanced Markdown features that they don’t support.

For example, Discord doesn’t support Markdown for tables, footnotes, and syntax highlighting. Another major Markdown feature that isn’t supported is hyperlinking. Discord may also interpret Markdown syntax differently than other platforms or apps, so it’s important to test your formatting to ensure it displays correctly.

Despite these limitations, Discord’s Markdown support is still robust enough to allow for effective formatting of text messages and is a useful feature for users looking to add emphasis to their messages.