The characters above are not an enigma nor a decrypted text intended to hide something…secretive. It is “Wingdings” spelled out in The Wingdings font. Strange…isn’t it?

My high school friends were intrigued by the fonts in Microsoft Word which had a font for every purpose. For example, want a creepy, ghost-like font? Choose “Chiller.” Feeling funky? Go for “Jokerman.” Want to create a play set in The Middle Ages? Here is the “Old English Text.” But “Wingdings” seemed to be on a different dimension of reality. Why you might ask? Because it has no letters…only symbols. As a 16-year-old who had binged The Matrix Series with his friends, this seemed like “a glitch in the matrix.” Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for The Architects), it was a whole load of “dingbats.” It meant nothing.

Wingdings has been confusing people since its creation. Like me, people have been trying to decode secret messages behind Wingdings. For example, after 9/11, some people had been looking for secret messages within Microsoft’s software only to uncover an anti-Semitic message found in Wingdings: a symbol of a skull and crossed bones followed by The Star of David and a thumbs-up symbol which correlated with the letters “NYC.” With this, some conspiracy theorists thought that this was a symbol of approval for the killing of Jews in NYC. Some people conspired that Wingdings had already known about the 9/11 attacks. This was demonstrated when one typed “Q33NY,” and it displayed an airplane and two consecutive fax papers (which denoted the twin towers), skull and bones and The Star of David.

However, Microsoft debunked the controversy by claiming that the selection of letters to symbols were coincidental. Furthermore, “Q33” was neither the flight nor the tail number. It does not have secret messages, nor does it have any letters, so what is Wingdings? Who created it? And Why?

What is Wingdings?

Wingding is a typeface, proprietary only to Microsoft Office, which contains icons and symbols. It has a symbol for PC, printer, mail, mouse, emoticons, and airplanes, to name a few. Today, some geeky and alternative people use this font to add pizzazz to their emails.

  However, this is not the first of its kind. A dingbat font, a family of fonts that contain solely symbols, was created in the 1980s called the Zapf Dingbat and was proprietary only to Apple. To beat their competition, Windows bought trademarks to Lucida which was has been a revolutionary typeface for the modern era. Fun fact: Arial, Calibri, and Sans Serif have all been originated from Lucida.

Who created Wingdings and why?

Two people made Wingdings happen: Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes (a husband and wife duo), who were the protégés of the legendary designer Hermann Zapf - the creator of Zapf Dingbats. They shared Zapf’s conviction to create new designs for new technologies and avoid making “warmed-over” versions of ancient designs. They achieved this by creating Lucida which is legible even with very small font sizes on a low-resolution display.

               Wingdings is not meant for writing. It is a tool meant for the pre-internet era. Today, I can go to the internet, copy an image, and paste that image wherever I like. An image contains only a few megabytes of data which is nothing compared to the size of our device’s memory. On the contrary, there were few ways to acquire images in the 90s. Even if someone received images, the floppy disks were not big enough to support it. If that were achieved not only the picture had a poor resolution, but it also would not adapt well with the text. In short, it was a burden. This is where Wingdings came to the rescue. Fonts like Wingdings provided a workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that did not need floppy disks. For instance, people could add a PC as a heading in excel to denote sales of a PC, or add an email symbol in their email to notify an RSVP to an event. It propelled a new generation of computer systems which had a huge range of possibilities, giving Microsoft an edge against its competitors. Que the famous Bill Gates meme: “It’s fascinating to imagine things people will do with their computers in 30 years.”

Wingdings paved the way for emojis. Both were made to support a technologically advanced means of communication. Wingdings had access to better software and electronic communication and hence a faster way of expressing ideas was needed. As a result, designers came up with symbols and icons. Similarly, Emojis benefited from digital keyboards that were open to change and had extensive capabilities. Hence, designers experimented with cartoon faces to communicate emotions as well as ideas. Although emojis came after wingdings, what started it all was a 17th-century printing press idea called dingbats.

Wingdings’s roots in the printer industry

Microsoft combined the word “Windows” with “dingbat” to create “Wingdings.” Dingbat was put in service by printers in the 17th century to ornament their text. We use Smart Art to remove the monotonous work of adding specific shapes to organize presentations, similarly dingbats prevented the laborious work of hand-carving letters or figures. This was accomplished by including tiny pieces of reusable shapes that could be slotted into text or as ornamentation in a book.

The Future of Wingdings

Wingdings add geekiness and an alternative look to electronic communication. Its symbolic language has often amazed and confused society. Many have tried to decode its mysteriousness, but there are not any. Can a font like Wingdings completely replace letters with images and symbols? Well, that seems impossible to predict because it lies between text and pictures. However, a future of symbolic conversation is not far away with the rise of emojis where we express emotions as a substitute for body language. Will emojis be the lingua franca of the digital world? (Mostly yes, because I have had instances where I used emojis to convey my message without requiring words to support it.)