Wingdings maps ASCII letters to pictographic symbols. Learn how Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow designed it in 1990, why the 1992 NYC controversy happened, and how Unicode 7.0 encoded it.
In 1992, only days after the release of Windows 3.1, someone typed "NYC" in Wingdings and got a skull and crossbones, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up gesture. Microsoft had to issue a public statement denying that the arrangement was intentional. The font became the internet's first viral controversy, years before the internet was mainstream.
Wingdings is not a cipher. It is a dingbat font that maps standard ASCII character codes to pictographic symbols instead of letters. When you type the letter N, the font displays a different glyph at the same code point. The mapping is purely visual. The underlying text data is unchanged.
You can experiment with this mapping using our Wingdings Translator, which converts between standard text and Wingdings symbols.
Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow designed the Wingdings font family between 1990 and 1991. They were already well-known typographers who had created the Lucida font family, widely used in technical publishing. The Wingdings glyphs were originally part of three separate font sets called Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows, and Lucida Stars, designed to complement the Lucida text fonts in height and weight.
Microsoft licensed the three sets from Holmes and Bigelow, combined them into a single font, and released the result as Wingdings in 1992 alongside Windows 3.1. The font was included for free with every copy of Windows, which gave it massive distribution. According to Microsoft's typography documentation, the font provides "a harmoniously designed set of icons representing the common components of personal computer systems and the elements of graphical user interfaces."
Two follow-up fonts followed. Wingdings 2, originally developed by Type Solutions Inc. in 1990, added enclosed alphanumerics and additional geometric shapes. Wingdings 3 consists almost entirely of arrow variations. Microsoft holds the trademark on all three, and the original Wingdings design was protected by U.S. Design Patent D341848, granted in 1993. The patent expired in 2007.
Wingdings is a TrueType symbol font. In a normal text font, the character code for uppercase N (ASCII 78) maps to a glyph that looks like the letter N. In Wingdings, the same code point maps to a skull and crossbones symbol. The underlying byte is identical. Only the visual rendering changes.
This means Wingdings is an encoding, not an encryption. There is no key, no secrecy, and no algorithm. Anyone with the font installed can read the text. Anyone without the font sees nothing (or sees the raw ASCII letters, depending on the application's fallback behavior).
The font contains approximately 226 glyphs. These include computer icons (monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer), pointing hands in multiple directions, arrows of varying weights, geometric shapes (circles, squares, stars), religious and astrological symbols, weather signs, and decorative ornaments. The alanwood.net Wingdings mapping table documents the full character-to-glyph correspondence.
When Unicode 7.0 was released in June 2014, many of the Wingdings and Webdings symbols were assigned official Unicode code points in the Dingbats, Supplemental Arrows, and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks. This meant that Wingdings symbols could finally be represented as standard Unicode characters rather than relying on a proprietary font. The Unicode Consortium's proposal document N4384 describes the encoding of 867 characters across the Wingdings and Webdings families, with 509 added in Amendment 1 and 266 unified with existing characters.
The 1992 NYC incident. When Windows 3.1 shipped, users discovered that typing "NYC" in Wingdings produced a skull and crossbones (N), a Star of David (Y), and a thumbs-up (C). Given New York City's large Jewish population, this was widely interpreted as an antisemitic message. Microsoft issued a strong denial, stating that the final arrangement of glyphs in the font was largely random. The company pointed out that the font had been designed by Holmes and Bigelow as a set of utility icons, not as a coded message. The New York Times covered the controversy at the time, and it became a cultural touchstone for how digital symbols can be misinterpreted.
Microsoft later addressed the issue directly. When they released the Webdings font in 1997, they intentionally mapped "NYC" to an eye, a heart, and a city skyline, referencing the "I Love New York" logo. This was a deliberate counterpoint to the Wingdings incident.
The 9/11 hoax. After September 11, 2001, an email circulated claiming that typing "Q33 NY" in Wingdings produced a plane flying into two towers followed by a skull and crossbones and a Star of David. This was a hoax. The flight numbers of the airplanes that hit the Twin Towers were AA11 and UA175, not Q33NY. The claim was fabricated to create a provocative visual coincidence. It nonetheless spread widely through email forwards, becoming one of the early examples of viral misinformation.
Wingdings has limited practical use in 2026. Unicode now provides standard code points for nearly all the symbols that Wingdings originally rendered, which means modern applications can display the same glyphs without requiring a proprietary font. However, Wingdings still ships with Windows and remains available in Microsoft Office applications.
The font is used in three contexts today. First, puzzle designers and escape room creators use Wingdings as a visual cipher layer. Players see a string of symbols and must identify the font, then convert the glyphs back to ASCII letters. Our Wingdings Translator handles this conversion directly. Second, some legacy documents created in the 1990s and early 2000s embedded Wingdings characters and still need the font for correct rendering. Third, Wingdings occasionally appears in CTF challenges as an encoding layer, typically as a warmup problem where contestants must recognize the font and decode the text.
For any new project that needs pictographic symbols, use the Unicode code points directly rather than relying on the Wingdings font. Unicode symbols render consistently across platforms, while Wingdings glyphs may display differently or not at all on non-Windows systems.
Wingdings is a proprietary font, not a standard. Its glyphs render only on systems that have the font installed, which today means Windows systems and Microsoft Office installations. On macOS, Linux, or mobile devices, Wingdings text may display as blank boxes or fall back to the wrong glyphs entirely.
The font is also not an encryption method. It provides no secrecy. The underlying ASCII text is fully intact in the document data and can be read by any text editor that ignores font rendering. Using Wingdings to "hide" text is equivalent to writing a message in invisible ink that becomes visible under any light.
For cross-platform symbol display, use Unicode code points. For actual text encoding, use a standard like Base64 or hex encoding.
No. Wingdings is a dingbat font that maps ASCII character codes to pictographic symbols. The underlying text data is unchanged. It is an encoding (visual substitution), not an encryption (which requires a key and provides secrecy).
Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow designed the font between 1990 and 1991. It was originally part of three separate font sets called Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows, and Lucida Stars. Microsoft licensed, combined, and renamed them as Wingdings, releasing the font with Windows 3.1 in 1992.
In 1992, users discovered that NYC in Wingdings displayed as a skull and crossbones, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up. This was widely interpreted as an antisemitic reference to New York City's Jewish community. Microsoft denied any intentional message and said the glyph arrangement was largely random.
Yes. Unicode 7.0, released in June 2014, assigned official code points to many Wingdings and Webdings symbols. They are spread across the Dingbats, Supplemental Arrows, and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks. The Unicode proposal document N4384 covers 867 characters from the Wingdings and Webdings families.
No. Wingdings is a proprietary Microsoft font included with Windows and Microsoft Office. On macOS, Linux, and mobile devices, Wingdings text may not render correctly. For cross-platform compatibility, use the equivalent Unicode code points instead of the Wingdings font.
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