What Wingdings Is
Wingdings is a font created by Microsoft type designer Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in 1990. Unlike a normal font, where each character renders as a letter, Wingdings renders each character as a small picture — a pencil, a hand pointing, a sun, a skull, a snowflake, a peace sign. The actual text doesn't change; only the visual interpretation does.
So "translating to Wingdings" really means: keep the same text, render it with the Wingdings font. The Microapp Wingdings Translator lets you do this visually in your browser — type your text, see the symbols, copy the text, paste it elsewhere with the Wingdings font set.
HELLO:• H → ✝ cross
• E → 🔔 bell
• L → 💀 skull
• L → 💀 skull
• O → ☀ sun
Visual result: cross, bell, skull, skull, sun. The underlying text is still "HELLO" — only the font changed.
The Wingdings Symbol Set
Wingdings maps every printable ASCII character to a different symbol. A few categories:
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Office / writing | Pencils, scissors, paperclips, files, envelopes, books |
| Religious / cultural | Cross (✝), Star of David (✡), Crescent (☪), Yin-yang (☯), Om (ॐ) |
| Zodiac signs | Aries through Pisces (12 signs) |
| Weather / nature | Sun (☀), Snowflake (❄), Rain drop (💧), Lightning |
| Faces / emotions | Smiley (☺), Frown (☹), Skull (💀) |
| Hand gestures | Pointing fingers (4 directions), thumbs up, peace sign |
| Geometric shapes | Stars, circles, squares, arrows |
Why Wingdings Was Created
In the early 1990s, software didn't yet support Unicode. To insert a small icon (an arrow, a star, a phone) into a document, designers had to either embed an image (clunky) or use a "dingbat" font where icons replaced letters. Wingdings — and its sibling fonts Webdings and Wingdings 2/3 — gave Word users instant access to a library of symbols without leaving the text editor.
Today, Unicode includes most of the same symbols natively (☀ ❄ ☺ ☯ are all standard Unicode characters), so Wingdings is mostly a nostalgic curiosity rather than a practical tool. But it still ships with Windows by default, and the conversion novelty (typing your name, seeing wacky symbols) keeps it culturally alive.
How to Use Wingdings Practically
In Microsoft Word: select your text, change the font to Wingdings from the font dropdown. Done.
In Google Docs: select your text → Font → More fonts → search "Wingdings" → install. Same as Word from there.
In Email: if your email composer supports rich text, select your text and apply Wingdings. Recipients with Wingdings installed (most Windows users) will see the symbols; others will see plain text.
In HTML/CSS: wrap text in an element with font-family: Wingdings. Browsers on Windows render the symbols; browsers on Linux usually don't (they fall back to default font).
The "NYC" Controversy
In 1992, a Usenet post noted that typing "NYC" in Wingdings produced a skull, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up — which some readers interpreted as a coded antisemitic message about New York City. Microsoft denied any intent (the character assignments were stated as arbitrary, designed by graphic-design needs, not encoded messages). The skull-Star-thumbs combination is generally accepted today as coincidental, but the story is a notable bit of font folklore.
The episode also surfaced a wider conversation about how arbitrary visual mappings can be misinterpreted — a useful early lesson for designers thinking about cross-cultural symbolism.
Common Pitfalls
Copy doesn't preserve the symbols. If you copy from a Wingdings-rendered source, you copy the underlying letters (HELLO, not the symbols). To preserve the visual symbols across applications, you need to either embed it as an image or rely on the destination having Wingdings as the active font.
Wingdings doesn't render on all platforms. Linux and many mobile devices don't ship Wingdings. Don't use Wingdings symbols in production websites or emails expecting them to display universally — use Unicode characters or proper image icons instead.
Confusing Wingdings with Webdings or Wingdings 2/3. Microsoft made several similar fonts. They have different character mappings — the 'A' in Wingdings is a pencil, but in Webdings is a spider. Specify the exact font you mean.
Related Tools
For Morse code translation (another character-substitution conversion), use the Morse Code Converter. For emoji-based text translation (the modern equivalent of Wingdings for casual messaging), see the Emoji Translator. For reversing text instead of replacing characters, the Reverse Text tool is the right choice.