From Printers’ Ornaments to Emoji: A Short History of Dingbat Fonts
Wingdings belongs to a tradition centuries older than computers. Here is the story of dingbats, from metal type to Zapf Dingbats, Wingdings and emoji.
Wingdings did not invent the idea of a font made of pictures. It belongs to a much older tradition: dingbats, the ornaments and symbols printers have kept in their type cases for centuries. This article traces that tradition from metal type to Zapf Dingbats, Wingdings and finally Unicode and emoji.
What is a dingbat?
In printing, a dingbat is any ornamental character that is not a letter or number: a pointing hand, a star, a flower, a check mark or a decorative divider. Printers used them to separate sections, draw attention to a line, or decorate a page. A dingbat font is a typeface made entirely of such symbols, so that each key produces a picture instead of a letter.
Printers’ ornaments in the age of metal type
Long before computers, type foundries cast ornaments and symbols in metal alongside letters. The pointing hand, sometimes called a manicule or index, is one of the oldest; it appears in the margins of medieval manuscripts and later in printed books and posters. Stars, asterisks, fleurons (flower shaped ornaments) and borders were all standard equipment in a print shop. When you see the pointing hands in Wingdings, such as ☜︎☞︎☝︎☟︎, you are looking at descendants of these ornaments.
Zapf Dingbats (1978)
The most influential modern dingbat font is Zapf Dingbats, designed by the German type designer Hermann Zapf. In 1977 Zapf drew more than 1,200 sketches of signs and symbols, and the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) selected 360 of them for the font released in 1978.
Zapf Dingbats became a standard part of desktop publishing. It was one of the 35 PostScript fonts built into Apple’s LaserWriter Plus printer, and it later became one of the standard 14 fonts that PDF software is expected to provide. For many designers in the 1980s, it was simply “the symbol font”.
Wingdings (1990)
Microsoft needed its own symbol font for Windows. In 1990 it combined three symbol fonts from the Lucida family by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows and Lucida Stars, into Wingdings, which shipped with Windows 3.1 in 1992. Where Zapf Dingbats leaned towards typographic ornaments, Wingdings added the objects of the computer age: floppy disks, computers, mailboxes, telephones and keyboards.
The same year, Type Solutions, Inc. developed Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3, which Microsoft later distributed with Office. Wingdings 2 focused on check boxes, pens and numbered circles; Wingdings 3 on arrows.
Webdings (1997)
With the rise of the web, Microsoft released Webdings in 1997, a picture font meant to replace small image files on web pages. Its buildings, vehicles and media buttons were a step towards the pictograms we use in messaging today.
The problem with picture fonts
All these fonts shared one weakness. A dingbat font works by putting pictures in the slots where letters normally live. The file still stores ordinary letters, so if the font is missing, the reader sees gibberish letters instead of symbols. Send a Wingdings document to someone without the font, or paste it into a chat, and the pictures vanish. This is still true today, and it is why the font method fails on social media.
Unicode: symbols as real characters
Unicode, the universal character standard, solved this by giving symbols their own code points. Its Dingbats block, starting at U+2700, includes the ITC Zapf Dingbats set, so a check mark or a pencil became a real character rather than a letter in disguise. In June 2014, Unicode 7.0 went further and added the Wingdings and Webdings pictographs that were still missing.
That change is what makes modern tools possible. The Wingdings translator does not change fonts at all: it swaps each letter for the matching Unicode symbol, so the result keeps its shape everywhere. You can see the code point of every symbol on the Wingdings chart.
From dingbats to emoji
Emoji are, in a sense, the colourful grandchildren of dingbats. Several Wingdings and Webdings pictures, such as the thumbs up 👍︎ and the bomb 💣︎, also exist as emoji. Phones often draw them in colour, which is why our translator offers an emoji-proof option that keeps the plain, font-style look.
Timeline of dingbat fonts
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Medieval to 20th century | Manicules, fleurons and printers’ ornaments in manuscripts and metal type |
| 1978 | ITC releases Zapf Dingbats by Hermann Zapf |
| 1990 | Microsoft creates Wingdings; Type Solutions develops Wingdings 2 and 3 |
| 1992 | Wingdings ships with Windows 3.1 |
| 1997 | Webdings released with Internet Explorer 4.0 |
| 2014 | Unicode 7.0 adds the remaining Wingdings and Webdings pictographs |
Frequently asked questions
What is a dingbat font?
A typeface made entirely of ornaments and symbols, so each key produces a picture instead of a letter. Zapf Dingbats and Wingdings are the best known.
Who designed Zapf Dingbats?
Hermann Zapf. ITC selected 360 of his sketches for the font released in 1978.
Why do Wingdings documents turn into letters on other computers?
A dingbat font only changes how letters look. Without the font installed, the reader sees the underlying letters. Unicode symbols avoid this.