Wingdings: Why is there the font? Easily explained

Wingdings is a font that consists exclusively of symbols. Why are there such fonts? We explain when and why fonts such as wingdings and webdings were invented.

Wingdings - The 1990 emoticons

Wingsdings is a font that consists only of characters. It is impossible to write a readable text. And yet the font has its purpose.

• Wingdings' predecessors, the Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows and Lucida Stars fonts, were developed and licensed in 1990 by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes.
• The three fonts, which contained only symbols, were intended to complement the Lucida font. The symbols were adapted to the size and proportions of the letters.
• This enabled the designers to easily use symbols and images to decorate text - similar to today's emoticons.
• The symbol fonts had several advantages: In times without the Internet, you could not simply search for images on the net that could be inserted into a text. In addition, the hard drives were not large enough to store many high-quality images.
• With the Lucida fonts you could insert pictures and symbols into texts without having to worry about the proportions, the quality and the required storage space.
• In the year of publication, Microsoft bought the rights to the three fonts and made them its own: Wingdings.

Microsoft developed the font

• Microsoft bought the three Lucida fonts and developed the Wingdings font from the preferred symbols.
• The limited memory size for Windows only allowed a limited number of characters, so not all symbols could be included.
• Since then Wingdings has been integrated in all Windows versions. Wingdings caused more hype than Microsoft expected.
• Many users interpreted Wingdings as a font for writing words. This led to misunderstandings. This gave rise to conspiracy theories such as that the font contained anti-Semitic messages.
• If you type the letters NYC in Wingdings, a skull, a Star of David and an upward thumb were created. Microsoft explained that all combinations were random. The symbol distribution was then revised.
• Incidentally, the name Wingdings is a suitcase word, composed of "Windows" and "Dingbat", a term that describes ornaments and symbols in the printing industry.

Wingdings and Webdings today

The Wingdings font still serves its purpose today:

• The advantages of wingdings are still used today. Although the storage space problem has more or less been solved, Wingdings still has a decisive advantage: With the font, symbols can easily be inserted into the body text without having to make adjustments to the proportions and size.
• For example, you can easily insert an email symbol in Word. You can get an overview of all available symbols by calling up the character table in Word via "Insert"> "Symbol" and setting "Wingdings" as the font.
• In addition to Wingdings, Microsoft also introduced the Webdings font with Windows 98. It is HTML-based and can therefore be read by any operating system. It is still suitable today for inserting symbols on web pages in continuous texts.

On the next page we will show you how to insert arrows in Word.