text-decoration

The text-decoration shorthand CSS property sets the appearance of decorative lines on text. It is a shorthand for text-decoration-line, text-decoration-color, text-decoration-style, and the newer text-decoration-thickness property.

The source for this interactive example is stored in a GitHub repository. If you'd like to contribute to the interactive examples project, please clone https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples and send us a pull request.

Text decorations are drawn across descendant text elements. This means that if an element specifies a text decoration, then a child element can't remove the decoration. For example, in the markup <p>This text has <em>some emphasized words</em> in it.</p>, the style rule p { text-decoration: underline; } would cause the entire paragraph to be underlined. The style rule em { text-decoration: none; } would not cause any change; the entire paragraph would still be underlined. However, the rule em { text-decoration: overline; } would cause a second decoration to appear on "some emphasized words".

Constituent properties

This property is a shorthand for the following CSS properties:

• text-decoration-color
• text-decoration-line
• text-decoration-style
• text-decoration-thickness

Syntax

The text-decoration property is specified as one or more space-separated values representing the various longhand text-decoration properties.

Values

text-decoration-line

Sets the kind of decoration used, such as underline or line-through.

text-decoration-color

Sets the color of the decoration.

text-decoration-style

Sets the style of the line used for the decoration, such as solid, wavy, or dashed.

text-decoration-thickness

Sets the thickness of the line used for the decoration.

Formal definition

Formal syntax

<'text-decoration-line'> | <'text-decoration-style'> | <'text-decoration-color'> | <'text-decoration-thickness'>

Examples

.under {
  text-decoration: underline red;
}

.over {
  text-decoration: wavy overline lime;
}

.line {
  text-decoration: line-through;
}

.plain {
  text-decoration: none;
}

.underover {
  text-decoration: dashed underline overline;
}

.thick {
  text-decoration: solid underline purple 4px;
}

.blink {
  text-decoration: blink;
}

<p class="under">This text has a line underneath it.</p>
<p class="over">This text has a line over it.</p>
<p class="line">This text has a line going through it.</p>
<p>This <a class="plain" href="#">link will not be underlined</a>,
    as links generally are by default. Be careful when removing
    the text decoration on anchors since users often depend on
    the underline to denote hyperlinks.</p>
<p class="underover">This text has lines above <em>and</em> below it.</p>
<p class="thick">This text has a really thick purple underline in supporting browsers.</p>
<p class="blink">This text might blink for you,
    depending on the browser you use.</p>

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• The individual text-decoration properties are text-decoration-line, text-decoration-color, and text-decoration-style.
• The list-style attribute controls the appearance of items in HTML <ol> and <ul> lists.