Wingdings Translator: Type Text, Get Symbols Instantly

Type on the left, read Wingdings on the right. Flip the direction to paste symbols in and get plain English back out. Everything runs inside this page — your text is never uploaded, so it is safe to paste something private.

How the Wingdings Translator Works

Wingdings is not a code, and it is not a language. It is a symbol font. When someone types the letter J in a document set in Wingdings, the file still contains the letter J — the font simply draws a smiley face where the letter would normally go. That distinction explains almost every strange thing people run into with Wingdings.

It also explains why pasting Wingdings text into Discord, Instagram or a phone keyboard usually fails: the receiving app has no Wingdings font, so it draws the underlying Latin letters and your careful row of symbols turns back into gibberish.

This translator sidesteps the problem entirely. Rather than switching fonts, it swaps each character for the Unicode symbol that corresponds to the Wingdings glyph — ✌ instead of A, ☜ instead of E, ♌ instead of h. Those are real characters with their own permanent slots in the Unicode standard, so they survive copy-and-paste into any modern app, on any device, with no font installed.

The three steps are simple: your text is split into individual characters (carefully, because many of these symbols sit above the Basic Multilingual Plane and naive code splits them in half), each character is looked up in the chart below, and anything with no Wingdings equivalent — accented letters, emoji, most punctuation — is passed straight through unchanged so your sentence keeps its shape.

Wingdings Character Chart

Decoding Wingdings Back to English

Flip the direction toggle and the whole map runs backwards. Paste a string of symbols, get the original letters. This is the part most Wingdings pages leave out, and it is the reason people end up screenshotting symbols and asking strangers on Reddit what they mean.

Two things are worth knowing about the reverse direction. First, decoding is only lossless if the symbols came from the same Unicode mapping — symbols someone drew by hand, or lookalikes borrowed from a different symbol set, will pass through unrecognised rather than turning into wrong letters. That is deliberate: a translator that silently guesses is worse than one that hands back what it could not read.

Second, capitals and lowercase are genuinely different symbols in Wingdings, not styling. A is ✌ but a is ☯. So decoding recovers the original capitalisation for free, which is unusual for this kind of tool.

Wingdings vs Webdings vs Dingbats

The three names get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing.

Name	What it actually is	Released
Wingdings	A Microsoft symbol font in three volumes (Wingdings, 2 and 3). Hands, faces, weather, religious symbols, zodiac, arrows.	1990
Webdings	A separate Microsoft symbol font aimed at web design. Different symbol set entirely — buildings, media controls, transport.	1997
Dingbats	The general typographic term for ornamental symbols, and the name of a Unicode block (U+2700–U+27BF). Not a Microsoft product.	Centuries old

The practical consequence: a phrase converted with Wingdings will look nothing like the same phrase converted with Webdings, because the letter Q is an aeroplane in one font and something else entirely in the other. If a symbol string will not decode here, it may well be Webdings.

Using Wingdings Symbols on Discord, Word and Social Apps

Discord, WhatsApp and other chat apps

Copy the output and paste it straight into the message box. Because the result is Unicode rather than a font change, it renders for everyone in the channel regardless of their device. Watch out for one thing: several Wingdings symbols are also emoji (👌 👍 💣), so a chat client may render them in full colour rather than as flat glyphs. Turning on Space out symbols above helps the eye separate them.

Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel

Inside Office you have a choice. You can paste the Unicode output from this page, which stays intact when the document is shared or exported to PDF. Or you can type ordinary letters, select them and change the font to Wingdings — that is how the font was designed to be used, but the symbols will vanish for anyone opening the file without the font, and they will not survive most PDF-to-text extractions.

Instagram, TikTok and profile bios

Unicode symbols work in bios, captions and usernames on most platforms, but each one filters a slightly different set. If a symbol shows up as an empty rectangle, that platform's font stack has no glyph for it — try a shorter phrase, or one that leans on the uppercase symbols, which have the widest device support.

Where Wingdings Came From

Wingdings was assembled in 1990 by type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, drawing on three earlier dingbat fonts they had created — Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows and Lucida Stars. Microsoft licensed the set, merged it, and shipped it with Windows 3.1. For most of the 1990s it was the fastest way to put an icon in a document, back when inserting an image was slow and printing one was expensive.

It also became famous for the wrong reason. In 1992 a widely-repeated rumour claimed that typing certain flight numbers in Wingdings produced a skull and a Star of David; Microsoft published a rebuttal and eventually reshuffled the glyphs in Wingdings 2 and 3. The coincidence was arithmetic, not intent — with 26 letters mapped to 26 symbols, some strings will always land somewhere unfortunate.

The font is still installed on essentially every Windows machine, and the Unicode Consortium has since documented a formal mapping from each Wingdings glyph to a Unicode code point, which is exactly the table this translator uses. Further reading: Wingdings on Wikipedia and the Unicode proposal documenting the Wingdings and Webdings mappings.

What People Use It For

• Sending a message that only friends with the chart can read
• Adding flat symbol icons to a Word or PowerPoint slide without inserting images
• Decoding a string of symbols someone posted in a Discord server or on Reddit
• Building a puzzle, escape-room clue or classroom cipher activity
• Dressing up an Instagram or TikTok bio with symbols that render on every device
• Checking what a name or phrase looks like in Wingdings before printing it

Frequently Asked Questions