Wingdings Translator - Convert Text to Wingdings Symbols

Wingdings is a decorative font created by Microsoft in 1990 that displays symbols and pictographs instead of traditional letters and numbers. When you type using Wingdings, each keystroke produces a corresponding symbol - for example, typing 'J' displays a smiling face (☺), while 'P' creates a flag symbol (🏱︎).

Originally designed to provide quick access to commonly used symbols before emoji existed, Wingdings remains surprisingly useful today. You'll find it in Microsoft Office applications, and it's particularly handy for adding visual elements to documents without needing special software or image files.

The font has become something of a cultural icon, featuring in everything from design projects to popular fiction (Dan Brown's novels notably featured Wingdings puzzles). Despite being over three decades old, it continues to serve both practical and creative purposes in modern digital communication.

1. Select your font variant (Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3, or Webdings) from the Font dropdown
2. Enter your content in the input box
   • To decode Wingdings: Paste your symbols
   • To create Wingdings: Type regular text
3. View your instant translation in the results box
4. Copy your converted text with one click using the Copy button

The translator works in both directions. Use the swap button to switch between encoding and decoding. Click the Clear button to reset both fields and start over.

Microsoft created three versions of Wingdings, each with a distinct set of symbols:

Wingdings (original)

The original 1990 font includes hand gestures (✌︎ 👍︎ 👎︎), faces (☺︎ ☹︎), religious symbols (✞︎ ☪︎ ✡︎), weather icons (☼︎ ❄︎ 💧︎), and common objects like mailboxes, folders, and scissors.

Wingdings 2

Released later, Wingdings 2 focuses on writing tools (🖊︎ 🖋︎ 🖌︎), pointing hands in more directions (👈︎ 👉︎ 👆︎ 👇︎), checkboxes and ballot marks (☑︎ ☒︎ 🗸︎), circled numbers (①︎ ②︎ ③︎), and facial expressions with varied emotions.

Wingdings 3

Wingdings 3 consists almost entirely of arrows in many styles: plain arrows (⭠︎ ⭢︎ ⭡︎ ⭣︎), diagonal arrows, heavy and outline variants, triangular shapes (▲ ▼ ◀ ▶), and keyboard symbols like Escape (⎋) and Return (⌤).

Webdings is a separate dingbat font created by Microsoft in 1997, originally bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0. While Wingdings was designed for print documents, Webdings was made for the web era and includes web-themed symbols.

Webdings characters include transport icons (🚲︎ 🚑︎ ✈︎), buildings and landmarks (🏗︎ 🏘︎ 🏠︎), media controls (⏩ ⏪ ⏸ ⏹ ⏺), nature scenes (🏞︎ 🏕︎), weather symbols, and various interface icons. All Webdings symbols were added to Unicode 7.0 in 2014, so they can be copied and pasted into any application that supports Unicode.

Wingdings has roots in traditional printing dingbats, decorative symbols that typesetters used for centuries. Type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes created the original symbol font, inspired by Hermann Zapf's Zapf Dingbats. Microsoft later bought the font and renamed it Wingdings, a combination of "Windows" and "Dingbats." It was designed as a practical way to add symbols and decorations to documents in an era when inserting images was difficult, essentially serving as an offline predecessor to emoji.

Video by Phil Edwards / Vox Almanac

This translator outputs Unicode characters rather than relying on the Wingdings font being installed. Most modern browsers and devices support these Unicode symbols, but some less common characters may appear as empty boxes on older systems.

If symbols appear as boxes or question marks, try copying the converted text into a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, which typically have broader Unicode support. You can also try viewing on a different browser or device.

The Wingdings alphabet is the set of symbols that each keyboard character maps to in the original Wingdings font. Every letter, number, and punctuation mark produces a different pictograph, so there is no spoken or written language behind it, just a one-to-one substitution. For example, uppercase A is a victory hand (✌︎), E is a pointing hand (☜︎), and lowercase a is the Cancer zodiac sign (♋︎).

The chart below lists the symbol for every letter A to Z, in both uppercase and lowercase, and every number 0 to 9 in the original Wingdings font, so you can look up or copy individual characters.

In Microsoft Word, type your text normally, select it, then choose Wingdings from the font dropdown on the Home tab. The selected characters change into the matching Wingdings symbols on screen.

Text formatted this way only displays as Wingdings on devices that have the font installed. If you copy it into an email, a web page, or a social media post, it reverts to plain letters. This translator avoids that problem by outputting Unicode symbols, which keep their appearance anywhere Unicode is supported, so you can paste them outside of Office without installing any font.