Wingdings Translator — Type Text, See Wingdings (and Back)

What Is Wingdings?

Wingdings is a symbol font that Microsoft shipped with Windows in 1990, built from three earlier “Lucida Icons” dingbat fonts by type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes (the name mashes up “Windows” and “dingbats”). Every key on the keyboard maps to a pictogram: J is a smiley face, N is a skull and crossbones, the lowercase letters run through zodiac signs and geometric shapes. It was meant as clip art you could type — but because typing a sentence in Wingdings produces a wall of mysterious symbols, it immediately became a playground code. Kids pass Wingdings notes, games and ARGs hide clues in it (the character Bill Cipher’s fans know it well, and W.D. Gaster’s dialogue in Undertale is famously set in Wingdings), and “Wingdings decoder” remains one of the most-searched cipher tools on the web.

How This Translator Works

A real Wingdings message is just ordinary text wearing a costume: the letters are normal, the font draws them as symbols. This page uses the standard table of Unicode equivalents for each Wingdings glyph — ☜ for E, 💣 for M, ♏ for e — and renders those characters directly. That has two advantages: the symbols display on phones and systems without the font installed, and the translation is honest about being a one-to-one substitution. Hover any symbol in the output to see which letter it stands for. A few Unicode glyphs differ slightly in style from the original font’s artwork, but the letter-to-symbol correspondence is the standard, widely published one.

Decoding Wingdings You Found Somewhere

• If you can copy the text: paste it into a plain-text editor first. If letters appear, that IS the message — it was normal text displayed in the Wingdings font.
• If it’s an image or screenshot: use the palette above. Click each symbol you see, in order, and the decoded letters build up live.
• If the symbols aren’t on the palette: you may be looking at Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3, or Webdings — sibling fonts with different tables — or at another symbol cipher entirely. Try the cipher identifier for letter-based codes.

Worked Example

Type hello and you’ll get ♒♏●●□ — Aquarius, Scorpio, two black circles, and a white square. Click those same five symbols on the palette in the decode tab and hello comes back. Capitals map to different symbols: HELLO becomes ☟☜☹☹🏳.

Frequently Asked Questions

Make a Symbol-Code Puzzle

Building a worksheet or party game around hidden messages? The free cryptogram maker creates printable letter-substitution puzzles with answer keys from any quote you choose.