Wingdings translator, text to symbols and back.

A Wingdings translator shows what a piece of text looks like when it is typed in the Wingdings font, where the letter A is a victory hand and the letter J is a smiling face. Wingdings is a Microsoft font made of symbols instead of letters. This translator does not use the font. It uses a table published by Unicode that says which Unicode character each Wingdings symbol stands for, so you get ordinary characters that paste into a chat, a post or a document, and that can be turned back into text.

How to use the Wingdings translator

1. Type or paste text into Your text. The symbols appear under Wingdings symbols as you type.
2. Press Copy to copy the symbols. Press Use the result as the text to move them into the first box and switch direction, which proves they translate back.
3. To decode, choose Symbols to text and paste Wingdings symbols. The text appears on the right.
4. Look at the two cards under the boxes. One counts the characters that were translated and the other counts those with no Unicode character.
5. Open Show how each character was translated for a row per character: the symbol, its Unicode code and name, and its Wingdings code. Use the chart below to find one symbol by name, such as heart or hand.

Worked examples

The key you press in Wingdings is the Wingdings code, and the table gives its Unicode character. The letter A is code 65, which is U+270C, the victory hand ✌. B is code 66, the turned OK hand sign. C is code 67, thumbs up 👍. So ABC becomes ✌🖏👍.

Hello is the codes 72, 101, 108, 108 and 111. They give 🖗 (white down pointing left hand index), ♏ (Scorpius), ⚫ (medium black circle, twice) and 🞏 (medium white square). The two l letters give the same symbol, because a code always gives the same character.

Where the mapping comes from

Unicode added most Wingdings and Webdings symbols to the standard. Michel Suignard of Unicode wrote a status document on this, WG2 N4384, dated 6 Nov 2012, with a source reference section that lists the Unicode code point for each index of the four symbol fonts. This page reads the Wingdings part of that list. It covers codes 33 to 254, which is 221 symbols with a Unicode character. Code 127 has no glyph. The earlier proposal, WG2 N4022 of 2011, shows that code 255, a company logo, was not proposed for encoding. Both were read on 19 Oct 2026.

This is a working document and not a current Unicode data file. It dates from before Unicode 7.0 (2014), which is when 116 of these 221 characters were added, so the characters have been checked against the current Unicode data files, version 18.0.0: every one is assigned, and its name and first Unicode version come from those files. No newer official table was found.

Letters, accents and what has no symbol

• The Wingdings font maps every printable key, so all letters, digits and ASCII punctuation have a symbol. A space stays a space.
• Text is read as Windows-1252, the character set Windows uses, so é, ñ, curly quotes and a few others have their own Wingdings symbols. Characters outside Windows-1252, such as Chinese characters or emoji, have none.
• The code for ÿ (255) has no Unicode character, and neither does code 127. These show as [?], or as the character you typed, or nothing, as you choose under When there is no symbol.
• In decode mode, anything that is not a Wingdings symbol stays as you typed it and is counted as left as typed.

Why a symbol can look different or show as a box

A device draws each character with whatever font has it. For these symbols that is usually a system symbol or emoji font, so the shape is similar to Wingdings but not the same. Many of the characters are from Unicode 7.0 and later, and an old device may have no font for them, so they can show as boxes. Some, such as the telephone or the envelope, also have a colour emoji form on phones. The plain symbol look setting adds the Unicode text selector U+FE0E after the 56 symbols that have a text version, according to Unicode's emoji variation sequences file (version 18.0.0). It is only a request, and an app may ignore it.

Typing it yourself, and decoding

Where you can choose a font, you can type with the Wingdings font itself and the same keys give the same symbols. This page is for the places where you cannot, such as a chat, a bio or a plain text file, and for reading what a string of symbols says. Decoding works by looking each symbol up in the same table backwards, which is possible because every Wingdings code has its own Unicode character.

Other Microsoft symbol fonts

The same Unicode document also covers Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 and Webdings. This page handles Wingdings only.

For other ways of writing messages, see the Morse code translator, the binary translator and the fancy text generator.