Wingdings is a series of dingbatfonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes.[1] Certain versions of the font's copyright string include attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint the font.
None of the characters were mapped to Unicode at the time; however, Unicode approved the addition of many symbols in the Wingdings and Webdings fonts in Unicode 7.0.[2][3]
Wingdings is a TrueType dingbat font included in all versions of Microsoft Windows from version 3.1[4] until Windows Vista/Server 2008, and also in a number of application packages of that era.[5]
The Wingdings trademark is owned by Microsoft,[4] and the design and glyph order was awarded U.S. Design Patent D341848 in 1993.[6] The patent expired in 2005. In many other countries, a Design Patent would be called a registered design. It is registration of a design to deter imitation, rather than a claim of a novel invention.
This font contains many largely recognized shapes and gestures as well as some recognized world symbols, such as the Star of David, the symbols of the zodiac, index or manicule signs, hand gestures, and obscure ampersands.
^The character 255 (FF) represents the Windows icon, which as a corporate logo has no Unicode point. Similar Unicode characters include U+1FA9F ๐ช︎ WINDOW. Compare the status of the Apple logo in Mac OS Roman and Mac OS Symbol.
The font was originally developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. Currently,[when?] the copyright holder is Microsoft Corporation. Wingdings 3 consists almost entirely of arrow variations and includes many symbols for keytops as defined in ISO/IEC 9995-7.
In 1992, only days after the release of Windows 3.1, it was discovered that "NYC" (New York City) in Wingdings was rendered as a skull and crossbones symbol, Star of David, and thumbs up gesture. This was often said to be an antisemitic message referencing New York's large Jewish community.[7] Microsoft strongly denied this was intentional, and insisted that the final arrangement of the glyphs in the font was largely random. "NYC" in the later-released Webdings font was intentionally rendered as eye, heart, and city skyline, referring to the I Love New York logo.[8]
"Q33 NY" in Wingdings
After September 11, 2001, an email was circulated claiming that "Q33 NY", which it claims is the flight number of the first plane to hit the Twin Towers, in Wingdings would bring up a character sequence of a plane flying into two rectangular paper sheet icons which may be interpreted as skyscrapers, followed by the skull and crossbones symbol and the Star of David.[7] This is a hoax; the flight numbers of the airplanes that hit the towers were AA11 and UA175; the tail numbers were N334AA and N612UA.[9]
In popular culture
In the indie video game Undertale made by Toby Fox, a hidden character known as W. D. Gaster uses the Wingdings typeface to speak.[10] In specific, Gaster uses it to speak during his Lab Entry #17, and on older versions of the Deltarune website.[11]
In a Saturday Night Live sketch in April 2024, Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Wingdings, son of Wingdings' fictitious creator โ Jonathan Wingdings โ a dad who was always "hard to read."[12][13]
