Wingdings is a symbol typeface: apply it to a keyboard character and the character appears as a picture or shape. A letter might become a pointing hand, a zodiac sign, or a geometric mark. The symbol follows the key, rather than the meaning of the word.
A font, rather than a language
There is no grammar to learn and no word-by-word dictionary. A translator replaces individual characters according to a table. Spaces and line breaks help preserve the layout of your message.
For example, uppercase A corresponds to a victory hand, while lowercase a corresponds to the Cancer zodiac symbol in Wingdings 1. Neither picture means “a” in ordinary writing; the association comes from the font’s keyboard mapping.
This is why you should avoid automatically making a message uppercase or lowercase. Changing the case changes the symbols, and decoding those symbols should recover the same case.
Where the font came from
Microsoft describes the original designs as Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars, created by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in 1990 and 1991. The fonts were reorganized and released as Microsoft Wingdings in 1992. Their pictures include computer equipment, office objects, hands, shapes, and other symbols. See the Microsoft font family reference for the history and licensing information.
The familiar Wingdings font and a modern web converter solve different display problems. A font changes how the original characters look. A web converter such as this one substitutes Unicode characters that correspond to the font’s symbols.
What this translator actually copies
Our Wingdings translator copies Unicode equivalents, using the Unicode L2/12-368 mapping reference. That makes the result usable in ordinary text fields without installing the original Microsoft font.
The shapes still depend on the fonts available in the receiving app. A Unicode telephone may be drawn differently from its Wingdings counterpart. If exact visual appearance matters, save the tool’s output as an image. To reproduce the original font in a document, use a licensed copy of Wingdings.
What can you do with it?
- Build a letter-substitution puzzle for a worksheet or scavenger hunt.
- Write a short symbol message for someone to decode.
- Find a specific icon by its keyboard key or Unicode name.
- Decode copyable symbol text using the reverse converter.
Wingdings is a transparent substitution, so anyone with the same chart can read it. Treat it as a visual puzzle, rather than a way to protect private information.
Finding your first symbol
Open the alphabet chart, select Wingdings 1, and look at uppercase and lowercase separately. Click a character to copy its Unicode equivalent. For a sentence, return to the translator and type the full message.
If a character stays unchanged, it is outside the selected mapping. This tool preserves those characters and shows a count so you can inspect them, rather than replacing them with an invented symbol.