What Is the Wingdings Font? History, Meaning & How to Get It
Wingdings is a dingbat typeface — every key prints a symbol instead of a letter. Here's where it came from, what each version means, and how to use it today whether or not you own the font.
What Does "Wingdings" Mean?
The name joins windows (it debuted with Microsoft Windows) with dings, from "dingbats" — the decorative ornaments printers have scattered through text since the days of metal type. A "dingbat font" swaps letters for pictures: press J and you get a smiling face, press ü and you get a check mark.
A Short History
- 1990–1992 — Type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes weave their Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars sets into one font. Microsoft ships it with Windows 3.1 as Wingdings.
- 1992 — Two companion faces, Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3, arrive with Microsoft Office: more hands and files in W2, pure arrows in W3.
- 1997 — Webdings debuts with Internet Explorer 4, a web-era icon set: houses, tools, transport and UI glyphs.
- 2000s — Unicode absorbs the dingbats, so Wingdings symbols can travel as plain text between systems. Urban legends about hidden messages make the font a pop-culture fixture.
- 2015→ — Undertale's W.D. Gaster speaks in Wingdings and a new generation rediscovers it. Search interest has grown steadily ever since.
Wingdings vs. Webdings vs. Symbol Fonts
| Font | Year | Style | Try it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wingdings | 1992 | All-rounder: faces, hands, mail, stars | Translator |
| Wingdings 2 | 1992 | Hands, files, circled numbers | W2 translator |
| Wingdings 3 | 1992 | Arrows only | W3 translator |
| Webdings | 1997 | Web-life icons | Webdings translator |
How to Tell If You Have the Font
On Windows: Settings → Personalization → Fonts, search "Wingdings". On Mac with Microsoft Office installed: Font Book → search Wingdings. Chromebooks and Linux generally don't include it — but you don't need it: our translator outputs equivalent Unicode symbols that render on every platform, and the chart lists them all.
Why the Font Matters Less Than It Used To
Because Unicode now encodes the important dingbats, symbol-for-symbol conversion works across devices. That's also why "Wingdings translator" searches have grown: people want the symbols without installing anything. That gap is exactly what this site fills.