Wingdings Translator

How to use it

1. Choose a direction: English to Wingdings, or Wingdings to English.
2. Type or paste your text in the box. Results update as you type.
3. Click "Copy result" and paste the symbols where you need them.
4. To decode, switch the direction and paste symbols that came from this tool.

Wingdings is a symbol font. Type the letter A in it and you get a victory hand instead. This translator reproduces that mapping with Unicode characters, so the result is text you can copy, search and paste anywhere, with no font to install. It converts both ways.

QuirkText is not affiliated with Microsoft. This tool does not include or replace the Wingdings font. It uses Unicode symbols that correspond to Wingdings glyphs.

How the Wingdings translator works

Wingdings is not a language and not a cipher. It is a font where each keyboard position holds a picture. The word "Hello" typed in Wingdings is still the characters H, e, l, l, o underneath. The font only changes how they look.

When you paste that text into a plain-text field that has no Wingdings font, you get the letters back, not the pictures. That is the problem this tool solves. It swaps each character for a Unicode symbol that looks like the Wingdings picture, so the pictures survive copying.

The table follows the character mapping listed on Wikipedia's Wingdings page. It covers the printable ASCII characters from ! to ~, which includes digits, capital letters, lowercase letters and punctuation.

Wingdings alphabet: sample mappings

The full list is built into the tool. You can see the mapping by typing the alphabet into it.

Translate English to Wingdings: a worked example

Take the word "Hello". Each letter is looked up on its own.

1. H (capital) maps to U+1F597, a hand index pointing down and to the left.
2. e maps to U+264F, the Scorpius sign.
3. l maps to U+26AB, a filled circle. This happens twice.
4. o maps to U+1F78F, a hollow square.

The result is five symbols for five letters. Note that capital H and lowercase h are different symbols, and the double l gives two identical circles. That repetition is why you can often guess double letters in Wingdings text.

How to read Wingdings text

If you have Wingdings symbols from this tool, switch to "Wingdings to English" and paste them. Each symbol is looked up in reverse and replaced by the keyboard character it came from. Anything the table does not know is left unchanged.

Reading Wingdings from a screenshot or a printed page is a different job. Match each picture to the table by eye, starting with distinctive ones such as the hands, which are mostly capital letters, and the zodiac signs, which are mostly lowercase a to i.

Why the symbols look different on other devices

The original Wingdings font draws every glyph itself. A Unicode symbol is only a code point, and the device decides which font draws it. A few results to expect:

• Some symbols, such as the victory hand, may appear as color emoji in some apps.
• Newer symbols above U+1F000 can show as empty boxes on old devices that lack a font for them.
• Spacing and weight differ. Do not count on exact shapes in a design.

If you need the exact original artwork, you need the Wingdings font itself, which ships with Windows and Microsoft Office.

Limits

• Only the characters in the table are translated. Accented letters, emoji and non-Latin text pass through unchanged.
• Reverse translation works on symbols that came from this table. Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 are separate fonts and are not included.
• Screen readers read the symbols by their Unicode names, not as your message. Do not use Wingdings text for anything someone must be able to read with assistive technology.

A short history

Wingdings was developed by Microsoft in 1990. Its glyphs come from the Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars designs licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, who are credited as its designers. It has been included in Windows since version 3.1. None of its characters had a Unicode code point at first, and Unicode 7.0 later added many symbols taken from Wingdings and Webdings, which is why a text-only mapping like this one is possible.

The font has also collected a few myths. In 1992 a rumor claimed that the letters "NYC" in Wingdings spelled out an offensive set of symbols, and Microsoft said the arrangement was largely random. After September 2001 another rumor claimed that "Q33 NY" produced a plane and buildings. The actual flights were AA11 and UA175, so the claim does not hold.

Related tools

For another picture script, try the hieroglyphics translator. If you want a real code with a rule behind it, see the Morse code translator or the binary code translator. A simple letter-swap cipher that is easy to do by hand is the Atbash cipher.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Wingdings (design, release, Unicode mapping table, rumors)
• Unicode Consortium: code charts (code point names and blocks)

Checked October 2026.