Wingdings translator

Type on the left and each character becomes the symbol Wingdings draws in its place. Capitals and lowercase are different symbols here. A capital A is a victory hand ✌︎, and a lowercase a is the sign for Cancer ♋︎.

Symbols picks how 56 of them look. Black and white asks for the plain outline, the way the font drew it in 1992. Colour emoji asks for the emoji version where your phone has one, so ✈︎ turns into a coloured plane. The other 165 only come in one style.

Paste Wingdings into the left box and press swap to read it. Anything the font never covered, like Cyrillic or an emoji of your own, goes through unchanged and is listed under the output.

Wingdings didn't store symbols. It stored ordinary letters and drew a picture in place of each one, keyed to its position in the Windows character set. Type "A" with the font selected and the file still says A. Change the font back and the hand turns into a letter again.

That's why Wingdings pasted into a chat box used to arrive as gibberish. The pictures lived in the font, and the font stayed behind.

Unicode fixed that in version 7.0, in 2014. Michel Suignard's survey of the Wingdings and Webdings sets counted 867 symbols across the four sets. 266 matched characters Unicode already had, 595 were proposed as new ones, five turned out to be the same symbol in both Webdings and Wingdings, and one was left out over a trademark. This tool writes the real code points for the 221 in Wingdings, so the symbols travel on their own.

Wingdings shipped with Windows 3.1 in 1992, and people soon noticed what "NYC" typed. A skull and crossbones, a Star of David, a thumbs up.

Microsoft investigated with the Anti-Defamation League and, according to the company, found "no evidence of malicious intent". The glyphs came from three fonts Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow drew in 1990 and 1991, Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars, and their order had nothing to do with the letters on top of them.

Microsoft did think about moving the symbols. It didn't, because every existing document stored letters and would have come out with different pictures. The mapping you see in the chart is the one from 1992, kept for compatibility.

When Microsoft made Webdings in 1997, it checked. Type NYC in Webdings and you get an eye, a heart and a city skyline.

A screen reader reads every symbol by its Unicode name, so "Hi" comes out as "white down pointing left hand index, pisces". Search engines won't turn the symbols back into words either. Wingdings is for puzzles and jokes, and a bad choice for anything someone needs to read.

Many of these symbols, the pencils and floppy disks added in 2014 among them, are missing from the fonts on older systems and show as empty boxes there. This page brings its own fonts, so you'll see every one here. Whoever you send it to needs a reasonably recent phone or computer.

Pigpen swaps letters for shapes too, but a pigpen shape is built from the letter's position in a grid, so it can be worked out by hand. Wingdings can only be looked up.

Bubble text keeps the letters readable and draws a circle round each one. To see which Unicode block every symbol here came from, paste the output into the Unicode converter.