Puzzle and cipher messages
A line of symbols a friend can decode by pasting it back here. It travels through chat apps intact, which the font version does not.
Text Tool
Wingdings Translator: Text to Symbols and Back
Convert text into Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 or Webdings symbols — 870 mapped characters — and read them back again. The result is Unicode, so it keeps its shape wherever you paste it.
Symbol set
Wingdings has 222 characters with a Unicode equivalent. Of what you typed, 9 of 9 can be converted.
If you have the font installed
That line is your own letters with the font applied. It looks right here and turns back into Meet me at 8 the moment it is pasted somewhere without the font. The box above does not — it is made of symbol characters.
Character by character
| You typed | Symbol | Unicode name |
|---|---|---|
| M | 💣 | Bomb · U+1F4A3 |
| e | ♏ | Scorpio · U+264F |
| e | ♏ | Scorpio · U+264F |
| t | ⧫ | Black lozenge · U+29EB |
| ␠ | ␠ | Space · U+0020 |
| m | 🔾 | Lower right shadowed white circle · U+1F53E |
| e | ♏ | Scorpio · U+264F |
| ␠ | ␠ | Space · U+0020 |
| a | ♋ | Cancer · U+264B |
| t | ⧫ | Black lozenge · U+29EB |
| ␠ | ␠ | Space · U+0020 |
| 8 | 🖰 | Two button mouse · U+1F5B0 |
First 40 characters.
4
Symbol sets
870
Mapped characters
Both
Directions
100%
Free
How to Use the Wingdings Translator
- 1
Type or paste
Your text for symbols, or a line of symbols to read back.
- 2
Pick the set
Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 or Webdings — each draws the same letter differently.
- 3
Copy the Unicode
The top box is characters, not formatting, so it keeps its shape wherever you paste it.
What This Translator Does
Type a line and it comes back as the symbols those letters draw in a Microsoft symbol font — the pointing hands, envelopes and boxes people remember from clip-art era word processors. Four sets are covered, 870 characters between them, and the translation runs both ways.
The output is the part that matters. It is not your letters wearing a font; it is a different set of characters. Copy it into a bio, a chat, a spreadsheet cell or a document on a machine that has never had the font installed, and the symbols are still there.
Nothing is uploaded — the whole translation happens in your browser, which is also why it keeps working with the page open and the connection gone.
Why Typing in the Font Does Not Travel
Select a word in a document, choose the symbol font from the font menu, and the word turns into symbols on screen. It is a convincing effect and it is only skin deep. The characters underneath are unchanged: the letter M is still the letter M, and the font is an instruction about how to draw it that lives in the document, not in the text.
So the symbols survive exactly as far as the document does. Paste into a browser field, a messaging app, a form, an email your reader opens on a phone — anywhere the font instruction does not follow — and the plain sentence reappears. Anyone who has sent a "secret" symbol message and watched it arrive as ordinary words has met this.
Unicode closed the gap. When the Consortium encoded these symbol sets in Unicode 7.0, each glyph became a character in its own right, with its own code point and name. Convert to those and there is no font instruction to lose: the symbol is the character. That is what the box on the right of the tool contains, and why the page shows the font-rendered version beside it rather than instead of it.
The Four Sets, Same Sentence
Each set assigns different symbols to the same keys, so the character you get for a given letter depends entirely on which one you choose. Here is Meet me at 8 through all four — generated by the tool, not typed out:
| Set | Characters mapped | "Meet me at 8" |
|---|---|---|
| Wingdings | 222 | 💣♏♏⧫ 🔾♏ ♋⧫ 🖰 |
| Wingdings 2 | 217 | 🖣🙚🙚⓿ ④🙚 🙦⓿ 🖸 |
| Wingdings 3 | 208 | ⮍🢫🢫◄ ↘🢫 🢧◄ ⮠ |
| Webdings | 223 | 🏔📦📦🛲 🕴📦 ✔🛲 ⏩ |
In rough terms: the first set is dingbats and hands, the second leans on marks and circled numbers, the third is arrows and pointers, and Webdings is pictograms of things — buildings, weather, transport. Pick by what the line should look like rather than by name.
Reading Symbols Back
Switch the direction and paste a line of symbols. Most decoders ask which set the line came from, which is an odd question to put to someone who was sent the line by a friend. This one checks all four and tells you which one answered — and if a character belongs to none of them, it says how many were left alone rather than quietly dropping them.
Round-tripping is exact: Meet me at 8 through Wingdings and back returns Meet me at 8, 12 characters read, 0 left alone.
What Converts, and What Does Not
A symbol set covers the keys of a keyboard, not the whole of Unicode. Letters, digits and common punctuation are mapped in every set; a character outside that range — an accented letter, an emoji, a Devanagari or Arabic letter — has no symbol to become. Those are passed through untouched rather than replaced by a box, and the panel under the input counts them for you before you copy.
One more limit worth stating: a handful of glyphs in the original fonts have no Unicode equivalent at all, so they cannot be translated portably by anything. In Wingdings that is a single character out of 223. Every other character in all four sets is covered.
If you want symbols without the letter-for-letter mapping — a heart, an arrow, a check mark chosen on its own — the Unicode symbols page has them by category with a search box, and its Android section covers which ones render where.
What People Use It For
Game and forum lore
Symbol fonts are a long-running shorthand for a hidden or corrupted message. Unicode output keeps it readable to everyone in the thread.
Decorative bios and names
A short symbol run beside plain text. Keep the searchable words plain — symbols do not match a search.
Reading an old document
Someone sent a file that looks like nonsense? Paste it into the decoder and see what it says.
Design mockups
Placeholder icon rows that survive being copied between tools, unlike text styled with a font.
Teaching how fonts work
The two boxes side by side make the point in one screen: formatting is not text.
Two cautions that apply to all of them. Symbols are not searchable — a name written in them will not be found by typing the plain version — and a screen reader announces each one by its Unicode name, which is rarely what the line means. The accessibility notes go through that properly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Wingdings translator?
A converter that takes each letter you type and gives back the symbol that letter draws in a symbol font. This one covers all four Microsoft sets — Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 and Webdings — 870 characters in total, and it works in both directions.
Do I need the Wingdings font installed?
No, and that is the point. The result is made of Unicode characters that carry the symbol shapes themselves, so it displays on a phone, a Mac, a Linux box and in apps that have never heard of the font. If you do happen to have the font installed, the page also shows you the old way — your plain letters with the font applied — so you can see the difference side by side.
Why does my Wingdings text turn back into letters when I paste it?
Because typing in a symbol font changes only how the letters are drawn. Underneath they are still A, B and C, and a font is a property of the document, not of the text. Paste into a bio, a chat box or an email that uses a different font and the letters come back. Converting to Unicode characters avoids this: the symbol is the character, so nothing can undo it.
Can I translate Wingdings back into English?
Yes. Switch to "Symbols → text" and paste the line. The tool reads all four sets at once and tells you which one it came from, so you do not have to know in advance. Round-tripping "Meet me at 8" through Wingdings and back returns "Meet me at 8" exactly.
Is this the same as the Wingdings font itself?
No. The font is Microsoft's and is not included, copied or needed here. What this uses is the public correspondence between those symbol sets and Unicode: the Unicode Consortium encoded these symbols as characters in Unicode 7.0, which is exactly what makes a portable translation possible.
What happens to characters a set has no symbol for?
They are left exactly as you typed them rather than dropped or replaced with a box. The panel under the input tells you how many of your characters the chosen set can convert, so you know before you copy.
Which set should I pick?
Wingdings for the classic dingbats — hands, envelopes, the smiling face on J. Wingdings 2 for cleaner checkmarks, circled numbers and pen shapes. Wingdings 3 for arrows and geometric pointers. Webdings for pictograms of things: buildings, transport, weather. The four examples on this page use the same phrase so you can compare them directly.
Is the Wingdings translator free?
Yes, with no sign-up. Everything runs in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded or stored.
Symbols are one way to change how text looks
If what you actually want is your words in a different letterform — bold, script, blackletter — that is the font generator, and it works the same portable way: characters, not formatting.