What Wingdings is
Wingdings is a “dingbat” font: every key on the keyboard produces a small picture. It was created in 1990 by type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and bundled with Windows shortly after. Before emoji existed, it was the easy way to put arrows, ticks, hands and stars into a document.
Because it is a font, text typed in Wingdings is still ordinary letters underneath. Change the font back to Arial and the message reappears. That makes it a simple substitution code, which is why it shows up in puzzles, escape rooms and games.
How this converter works
The tool does not rely on the Wingdings font being installed. In 2014 the Unicode standard added the Wingdings symbols as real characters. The converter swaps each letter, number and punctuation mark for its matching Unicode symbol, so the result can be copied and pasted as plain text.
- Type or paste English in the left box to get Wingdings.
- Type or paste Wingdings in the right box to get English.
- Press Copy above the side you want.
Capital and small letters give different symbols, as they do in the real font.
A few letters to recognize
| Letter | Symbol | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| A | ✌ | Victory hand |
| C | 👍 | Thumbs up |
| D | 👎 | Thumbs down |
| J | ☺ | Smiling face |
| L | ☹ | Frowning face |
| M | 💣 | Bomb |
| N | ☠ | Skull and crossbones |
| Q | ✈ | Airplane |
| S | 💧 | Droplet |
| T | ❄ | Snowflake |
Small letters a to i are the zodiac signs from Cancer to Pisces. The numbers produce office items such as folders and documents.
Why Wingdings is popular again
Much of the recent interest comes from the game Undertale. A hidden character, W. D. Gaster, speaks only in Wingdings, and fans decode his lines to work out the story. If you are here to read a Gaster message, paste it in the right-hand box.
Other common uses:
- Puzzles and treasure hunts, as a simple cipher
- Secret notes between friends
- Usernames and bios that stand out
- Decoding a document that someone saved in the Wingdings font by mistake
If the symbols look wrong
The meaning of a Wingdings message depends on the exact characters, but the look depends on your device. Phones tend to draw some symbols as colorful emoji and others as plain outlines. Missing symbols appear as boxes. None of this changes the message: paste it back into this page on any device and it decodes to the same text.
To see the classic look, paste your normal text into Word or Google Docs and set the font to Wingdings.