Wingdings translator

A font of pictures Microsoft made in 1990 from three symbol fonts of the Lucida family, and has shipped with Windows since version 3.1. Each key sets a picture instead of its letter: a capital A is a victory hand, J a smiling face, N a skull and crossbones.

It was made for bullets, ticks and arrows in documents, long before emoji. Typed in Word and then set in Wingdings, any sentence turns into a row of pictures, which is how it became a code.

Text set in the font is still letters underneath: send it and it arrives as letters, unless the other side has Wingdings too. In 2014 Unicode 7.0 gave nearly every Wingdings symbol a code of its own, so this page writes those codes. They are text, and they arrive as symbols in a message, a post or a name.

Each app draws them in its own symbol font, so a few look a little different from the ones on Windows, and an older phone may show a box for one it lacks. This page draws them in Noto Sans Symbols 2, an open font made to cover them.

In Undertale, W. D. Gaster’s lines are written in Wingdings, in capitals: hands, faces, crosses and flags. Paste a line in and it reads back as letters, or, from a screenshot, tap its symbols in the alphabet one by one.

Other translators set some keys with older symbols, a skull for N or a drop for S. They read back here too.