How to Write in Wingdings Wherever You Type

Switching the font. You type normal letters, select them and change the font to Wingdings. Each supported key now shows a picture, but underneath it is still the letter you typed. That's fine inside a document that stays in an app with the font installed. Copy the same text into a chat or an app without Wingdings, though, and the pictures turn back into letters.

Pasting symbols. You type English into the translator and copy the result. Many Wingdings and Webdings pictures have their own Unicode code points, so what you copy is the symbol itself as plain text, not a letter wearing a costume. It survives being pasted into chats, games and design apps. The catch: these are copyable Unicode equivalents, so a few may look slightly different from Word's glyphs, and a device without a matching glyph may draw them differently.

Rule of thumb: staying inside one Word or Pages file, switch the font. Sending it anywhere else, paste symbols.

To turn a whole phrase into Wingdings, type it, select it, then choose Wingdings from the font box on the Home tab. The same works in PowerPoint. Switch the font back to keep writing normally.

For a single symbol, such as a check mark in a list, use the symbol picker. Microsoft's own steps for Word on Windows are: put the cursor where the symbol should go, open Insert, select Symbol, then More Symbols, choose the Wingdings font in the dialog, pick the character and select Insert. For check marks, Word's Symbol dialog does have one in the Wingdings font (character code 252), but this site's Wingdings 1 mapping doesn't include a tick, so to copy one as text, use Wingdings 2. Our Wingdings check mark guide covers that difference step by step.

Don't count on finding Wingdings in Google Docs. Docs works from its own font list, which you can extend with "More fonts", and Wingdings is a Microsoft font that isn't in the Google Fonts catalog.

You have two ways round it:

• Paste from the translator. Type your message, copy the result and paste it into the document. Docs treats the symbols as ordinary text, so they stay symbols for anyone who opens the file.
• Insert one symbol at a time. Go to Insert, then Symbols, then Special characters. Pick from the categories, enter a Unicode value or draw the shape, then click the character to add it.

For a whole sentence, pasting is quicker. For one arrow or star, the Special characters panel is enough.

Apple's list of fonts included with current macOS versions contains Wingdings, Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 and Webdings. That means the font switch works outside Office too. Select the text in Pages, TextEdit or Keynote, open the font menu and choose Wingdings. Word for Mac works the same way as on Windows.

To drop in a single symbol on a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Control-Command-Space or Fn-E (or Edit, then Emoji & Symbols), search for the symbol's name and click it, or double-click it if the viewer is expanded. And if you are writing in Messages, Notes or a browser app, paste from the translator so the person reading sees symbols, not letters.

Chats, social posts and game names don't let you pick a font, so the font switch is useless there. Use the translator on the home page: type up to 500 characters, press "Copy result" and paste. To decode a message someone sent you, paste the mapped Wingdings symbols back into the same box. The Wingdings 1 chart below it also lets you search by key, symbol name or Unicode code point and copy a single tile.

Need a different set? Wingdings 2 holds the ticks and ballot boxes, and Webdings is a separate Microsoft font whose keys map to different pictures. Fans of Undertale's W. D. Gaster can decode Gaster's lines on a page of their own.

Two things this site doesn't do: it doesn't read Wingdings out of a screenshot or photo, so paste the symbols as text, and it doesn't offer the Wingdings font as a download. For most messages you won't need the font at all. Type your text into the translator, copy the result, and paste it where you want it.