To strike through text in markdown, wrap it in double tildes: ~~like this~~ renders as like this.
The meeting is on ~~Tuesday~~ Wednesday.
The meeting is on Tuesday Wednesday.
Is strikethrough part of standard markdown?
No — original markdown and the CommonMark spec have no strikethrough. The ~~tildes~~ form comes from GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) and is now supported almost everywhere developers write markdown: GitHub, GitLab, Discord, Reddit, Obsidian, Notion, Discourse, and this site.
If your renderer is strict CommonMark and tildes stay visible, fall back to HTML, which any markdown processor that allows inline HTML will render:
<del>deleted text</del> or <s>no longer accurate</s>
Use <del> for "this was removed/changed" (screen readers announce it as deleted) and <s> for "no longer accurate".
Does a single tilde work?
Sometimes — and that's the problem. GitHub and Discord render single-tilde ~text~ as strikethrough too, but many other processors don't, and Pandoc uses single tildes for subscript. Always use double tildes; they work everywhere the feature exists.
How do you strikethrough in Slack?
Slack's message box isn't real markdown — it uses its own formatting where a single tilde does strikethrough: ~like this~. Double tildes in Slack render as literal characters. (Same trap in WhatsApp: single tilde.)
Can you combine strikethrough with bold or italic?
Yes — nest the markers, keeping them symmetrical:
~~**bold and struck**~~ and ~~*italic and struck*~~
bold and struck and italic and struck
A common real-world pattern is striking through completed items in a task list: - [x] ~~Ship v1~~.