Wingdings Translator (keyboard text ⇄ Wingdings symbols as Unicode)

Understanding the Wingdings translator — concept and principle

Wingdings is a symbol font: typing a letter in it shows a picture instead, such as a victory hand for A or an aeroplane for Q. Because only the font changes, the hidden text is still ordinary letters. This translator swaps each keyboard character for the real Unicode symbol that matches its Wingdings glyph, so the symbols survive copy and paste, and it can translate those symbols back into letters.

How it is calculated

Each keyboard character from ! (0x21) to ~ (0x7E) maps to one Unicode symbol, following the Wingdings mapping prepared for Unicode 7.0:

• for example A → ✌, C → 👍, J → ☺, Q → ✈, H → 🖗, e → ♏, l → ⚫, o → 🞏
• capital and small letters give different symbols
• spaces stay spaces; characters outside the range (accented letters, Hangul) stay as typed

Reverse mode looks each symbol up in the same table to recover the original character.

The principle

A font maps character codes to glyph pictures. In Wingdings, the code for "A" is drawn as a hand sign, but the underlying data is still "A", which is why the effect disappears when the font changes. In 2014, Unicode 7.0 added many of the missing pictographs from Wingdings and Webdings as real characters, such as the pencil 🖉 (U+1F589) and folder 🗀 (U+1F5C0). Mapping letters to those code points makes the symbols part of the text itself, independent of font.

Worked example

Default inputs: text → Wingdings, "Hello World".

1. H → 🖗, e → ♏, l → ⚫, l → ⚫, o → 🞏.
2. W → 🕈, o → 🞏, r → ❒, l → ⚫, d → ♎.
3. Result: 🖗♏⚫⚫🞏 🕈🞏❒⚫♎.
4. Characters translated = 10.
5. Characters left as typed = 0 (the space is kept as a space).

How to read the result

The symbols display wherever the device has fonts for them; many appear as colour emoji on phones, so the look differs from the original black-and-white Wingdings font. To read a Wingdings message, paste the symbols into reverse mode. Remember that Wingdings is a novelty, not encryption.

Common mistakes

• Expecting the same look as the Wingdings font on every device.
• Mixing up capital and small letters, which produce different symbols.
• Using it to hide sensitive information; anyone can reverse it.
• Expecting characters outside ! to ~ to translate.

Frequently asked questions

Why does copying Wingdings text lose the symbols?

The symbols come from the font; the underlying text is ordinary letters.

Can I translate symbols back to text?

Yes, use the "symbols → text" mode.

Why do some symbols look like colourful emoji?

Phones often display these Unicode characters with emoji fonts.

Does Wingdings work with Korean?

No. Only keyboard characters from ! to ~ have Wingdings symbols.

Sources: M. Suignard, "Status of encoding of Wingdings and Webdings Symbols", ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4384 / Unicode L2/12-368 (2012) · The Unicode Standard 15.1, Unicode Character Database (character names)