Wingdings Translator
Wingdings was Microsoft’s 1990s dingbat font, a collection of 191 pictograms (arrows, checkmarks, hands, flags, zodiac signs) mapped onto the ASCII letter codes. Typing hello in Wingdings rendered as five little symbols on-screen. This translator shows the symbols in a modern Unicode-safe way, with the original Wingdings mapping plus a reverse decoder so you can figure out what someone else typed.
How to translate to Wingdings
-
1
Enter English text
Letters, digits and common punctuation all have Wingdings mappings.
-
2
Pick direction
English to Wingdings, or paste Wingdings to decode back to English.
-
3
Translate
Each character is substituted via the published Wingdings 1 mapping.
-
4
Copy as text or image
Text uses Unicode approximations; image uses the genuine Wingdings font.
A sample of the Wingdings mapping
| ASCII | Wingdings 1 rendering |
|---|---|
| A | Triangular pennant |
| B | Fork and knife |
| C | Bomb |
| F | Skull and crossbones |
| J | Smiley face |
| L | Neutral face |
| N | Frowning face |
| P | Left-pointing thumbs up |
| Q | Right-pointing thumbs up |
| U | Filled cross |
| V | Six-pointed star |
| Z | Filled circle |
Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 add more arrows and geometric shapes. Webdings (also Microsoft) overlaps slightly but uses a different mapping.
The “Q33 NY” conspiracy
In 2001, a chain email claimed that typing the flight number of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center into Wingdings produced a plane pointing at two buildings followed by a skull and Star of David. The flight was actually AA11, not Q33 NY, and the “symbols” result simply reflects the arbitrary mapping of those ASCII letters to pictograms. Famous example of pattern-matching from nothing.
Unicode equivalents
Most Wingdings pictograms have since been encoded in Unicode as proper characters:
- U+2764 heavy black heart (Wingdings
Y) - U+2713 check mark (Wingdings
ü) - U+2708 airplane
- U+2605 black star (Wingdings
«)
The translator shows the best matching Unicode glyph so the result renders in any browser, regardless of whether Wingdings is installed.
Why it still matters
- Accessibility retrofits. Legacy documents in Word from 1998 that use Wingdings for checkmarks render as random letters on machines without the font. Converting to Unicode fixes them permanently.
- CAPTCHA and puzzles. Still shows up in escape rooms and small ARGs as a simple substitution cipher.
- Nostalgia. Windows 95 screensavers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Conceptually similar but technically separate. Emoji are proper Unicode characters that render the same on every modern OS. Wingdings is a font-level substitution that looked right only when the Wingdings font was installed — which is why old documents now render as gibberish on Linux or mobile.
You can paste the ASCII letters and apply CSS font-family: Wingdings to render them as pictograms. Chrome and Firefox do not ship with the font, so users on those browsers see the underlying letters.
Pre-Unicode (before 1996), there was no standard way to include arrow or bullet glyphs in documents. A decorative font that mapped pictograms to letter codes was the closest Microsoft could offer. Unicode made it obsolete but it never left.
No. The translation is a local character-map lookup.
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