Wingdings Translator

This Wingdings translator turns typed text into Wingdings-style symbols, such as 🖗♏⚫⚫🞏 for Hello, and decodes pasted symbols back into letters. It uses real Unicode characters, so the result survives copy and paste in chats, bios and forms, unlike text typed in the Wingdings font itself.

How to use the Wingdings translator

1. Choose a direction: Text to Wingdings, or Wingdings to text for decoding.
2. Type or paste into the box. The result appears underneath as you type.
3. Press Copy, or tap a key in the Wingdings key chart to copy a single symbol.

What Wingdings is

Wingdings is a symbol font that Microsoft developed in 1990 by combining glyphs from the Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars fonts licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, and it shipped with Windows 3.1 (Wikipedia’s Wingdings article, citing Microsoft Typography). Instead of a set of letters, it assigns a picture to each keyboard position. Press the letter J in Wingdings and you see a smiley face; press the letter M and you get a bomb; press Q and you get an aeroplane. There are also Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3, with more symbols and arrows.

It has a small place in internet lore, because early users noticed that a harmless word could look sinister in Wingdings, and because games and fan communities use it for secret messages. Mostly it is just a clever font, which was a precursor of emoji.

Why copying Wingdings does not work

This is the main confusion, and it explains why a translator is needed at all.

1. In a word processor, you type “Hello” and switch the font to Wingdings. The characters in the file are still H, e, l, l, o.
2. The Wingdings font draws those letters as pictures.
3. Copy the text to an app that does not use Wingdings, such as a chat, a bio or a web form, and you get “Hello” back, because the font choice was not part of what you copied.

So Wingdings is a font-based trick rather than a Unicode one. Text in the real font is not really symbols. To send symbols that survive copy and paste, you need actual Unicode characters, and that is what this tool produces.

How the translator maps letters

Unicode has no “Wingdings” block. But many Wingdings pictures were later adopted into Unicode, in the Dingbats block (U+2700), the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2600) and the emoji ranges. For each key the translator picks the Unicode character that depicts the same thing. A few examples that I verified exist, with the usual Wingdings position for a capital letter:

The key-to-picture assignments in the first column follow the commonly published Wingdings chart. The tool shows the full table, with an approximation where Unicode has no close match.

Two cautions. First, Unicode symbols look different in every font, and some are drawn as colour emoji on phones, so your ✌ may look different on a friend’s device. Second, the mapping is for fun and recognition, not an encryption. Anyone with a Wingdings chart can read it.

Decoding

The decoder works the other way. Paste symbols that match the mapping and you get letters. If you have text in the real Wingdings font from a document, copy it into a plain-text field and the letters will appear directly. For a message that is an image, you have to compare each symbol with a chart by eye. The mapping is not one-to-one in every case, because a few symbols appear in more than one Wingdings font, so use the context to check what the message means.

What to use instead

If you want symbols for decoration, not as a cipher, you might find symbol pages more convenient: hearts, stars, arrows and crosses are listed with their code points. To type symbols on a keyboard, see the Alt codes page. For fancy letters rather than pictures, try a text decorator, and for odd or unusual lettering the weird text generator.

Accessibility and safety

Screen readers announce symbols by name, so a Wingdings message is read as “skull and crossbones, victory hand, airplane”, which is unlikely to be what you meant. Do not use symbols for anything that has to be understood by everyone. Also remember that messages in symbols can be read as threatening by the recipient, so a joke may land badly. Think before sending a message that shows skulls or bombs to someone who might not get the reference.

Wingdings, Webdings and Unicode

Microsoft shipped several symbol fonts alongside Wingdings. Webdings (1997) focuses on web and interface icons, and Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 add more shapes and arrows. They all work the same way: they remap letter keys to pictures. The translator targets the original Wingdings.

When Unicode added its large set of symbols and then emoji, many of the same ideas were encoded as real characters, which is why Wingdings pictures such as the hand pointing right or the envelope have Unicode counterparts today. The Dingbats block, in particular, covers classic decorative symbols. That is the reason a translator is possible at all: the pictures exist in Unicode, even though the old letter-to-picture mapping does not.

Tips for using translated text

• Keep messages short. A long run of symbols is tiring to read and impossible for a screen reader to make sense of.
• Preview on the device that matters. Phones may show some symbols as colour emoji, and desktops may show them as plain line drawings.
• Do not rely on symbols to keep anything private. A Wingdings message is a puzzle rather than a secret.
• If you need the real font for a document, set the font to Wingdings in Word or Google Docs where available, but expect the text to turn back into letters when you export it as plain text.

A wingdings translator like this one is best treated as a fun puzzle tool: the symbols are real characters, so they paste anywhere, but they are not a secret code.