How to Translate Wingdings

Wingdings is a common special font that includes various symbols not typically found on a computer keyboard. Technically, each symbol in the font does correspond to a particular letter, so you can take text in a standard font and "translate" it to the Wingdings font and vice versa. You can either find Wingdings translator programs online to do this for you, or get a paper or digital Wingdings chart and do your own lookups.

A font is a set of representations of letters on a computer or in print. Most fonts offer different variations on how common letters, numbers and punctuation symbols are displayed, with some delivering more ornate versions of letters and others including simpler letters. Different fonts look better in different situations, and some fonts look better on small screens while others look better on bigger displays or in print.

Wingdings is a specialized font used for simple illustrations and icons. It includes a symbol for each letter of the alphabet and numeral on the keyboard, but these symbols aren't particularly related to the letters and numbers they correspond with. For instance, one letter might be represented as a zodiac symbol, while another might be used to represent an icon of a telephone. Frequent users of Wingdings and other so-called icon fonts, such as Webdings and Font Awesome, might remember which letters and numbers correspond to which symbols, but most people will need a chart to see which is which.

Wingdings takes its name from "dingbats," which were symbols that could be used alongside text on a traditional printing press.

In recent years, more complex symbols have been added to Unicode, the international standard for text that devices can display and print, so it's often less necessary to use specialized fonts like Wingdings.

Each character in a string of Wingdings symbols corresponds to a letter of the alphabet or another symbol on the keyboard, and each letter has its own unique Wingdings representation. That means that Wingdings can be used as a fun way to send a coded message, since whoever receives it can translate from Wingdings back to ordinary text.

Occasionally, you may also have text that is incorrectly displayed or printed in Wingdings or a similar font because of some sort of computer error or a human mistake. If this happens, the text can still be recovered by translating it back to an ordinary font.

If the text displayed in Wingdings is still in a computer program like a word processor or spreadsheet tool, it's usually easy to convert it back to a normal font. Simply select the text and choose another font from the program's text formatting menu. Verify that the translated text makes sense.

If the text is printed out or captured in a screenshot, you usually won't be able to simply change its font. An alternative in this situation is to find a Wingdings translator tool online that will let you click or tap the Wingdings symbols you see and display the corresponding normal text. You may need to verify that the text you're looking at is actually in Wingdings and not in another icon font by comparing the symbols on the page or in the image with what's in Wingdings. You can also use these translator tools to go the other way, determining what letters you would need to type in Wingdings to get a particular character into your document.

If you need a tool that can work offline, you can find a printable Wingdings chart that you can use to manually find individual characters and their proper representations.