Wingdings
Encyclopedia
Wingdings are a series of dingbat
font
s which render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft
by combining glyphs from Lucida
Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow
and Kris Holmes
. Certain versions of the font's copyright string include an attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint
the font.
dingbat font included in all versions of Microsoft Windows
from version 3.1 onwards.
The Wingdings trademark is owned by Microsoft, and the design and glyph order was awarded US Design Patent
D341848 in 1993. The patent expired in 2005. In many other countries, a Design Patent would be called a registered design. It is registration of a design to deter imitation, rather than a claim of a novel invention.
This font contains many largely recognized shapes and gestures as well as some recognized world symbols, such as the Star of David
and the symbols of the zodiac
. The font is not mapped to Unicode
, although many of its symbols are available in that system.
font distributed, for example, with Microsoft Office
. The font was developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. Now the copyright
holder is Microsoft Corp
. Among the features of Wingdings 2 include 16 forms of the index
, Enclosed Alphanumerics from 0 to 10, multiple forms of ampersand
and interrobang
, several geometric shapes and an asterism
. The font is not mapped to Unicode
.
dingbat
font
distributed with Microsoft Office
and some other Microsoft products.
The font was originally developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. Currently, the copyright
holder is Microsoft Corporation
. Wingdings 3 consists entirely of arrow
variations.
, and thumbs up gesture. This was often interpreted as an antisemitic message. Microsoft strongly denied this was intentional, and insisted that the final arrangement of the glyphs in the font was largely random. (The character sequence "NYC" in the later-released Webdings
font, in turn, was intentionally rendered as eye, heart, and city skyline, referring to the I Love New York
logo.)
Dingbat
A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character"....
font
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
s which render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
by combining glyphs from Lucida
Lucida
Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1985.There are many variants called Lucida, including scripts , serif , and sans-serif .Bigelow & Holmes, together with the TeX vendor Y&Y, extended the Lucida family with a full...
Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow
Charles Bigelow (type designer)
Charles A. Bigelow is a type historian, professor, and designer. Bigelow grew up in the Detroit suburbs and attended the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. Along with Kris Holmes, he is the co-creator of Lucida and Wingdings font families...
and Kris Holmes
Kris Holmes
Kris Holmes is a type designer. She is with Charles Bigelow the co-creator of the Lucida font family.She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her MFA from UCLA Film School in Animation...
. Certain versions of the font's copyright string include an attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint
Font hinting
Font hinting is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing a clear, legible text...
the font.
Wingdings
Wingdings is a TrueTypeTrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
dingbat font included in all versions of Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
from version 3.1 onwards.
The Wingdings trademark is owned by Microsoft, and the design and glyph order was awarded US Design Patent
Design patent
In the United States, a design patent is a patent granted on the ornamental design of a functional item. Design patents are a type of industrial design right. Ornamental designs of jewelry, furniture, beverage containers and computer icons are examples of objects that are covered by design...
D341848 in 1993. The patent expired in 2005. In many other countries, a Design Patent would be called a registered design. It is registration of a design to deter imitation, rather than a claim of a novel invention.
This font contains many largely recognized shapes and gestures as well as some recognized world symbols, such as the Star of David
Star of David
The Star of David, known in Hebrew as the Shield of David or Magen David is a generally recognized symbol of Jewish identity and Judaism.Its shape is that of a hexagram, the compound of two equilateral triangles...
and the symbols of the zodiac
Zodiac
In astronomy, the zodiac is a circle of twelve 30° divisions of celestial longitude which are centred upon the ecliptic: the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere over the course of the year...
. The font is not mapped to Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, although many of its symbols are available in that system.
Wingdings 2
Wingdings 2 is a TrueTypeTrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
font distributed, for example, with Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
. The font was developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. Now the copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
holder is Microsoft Corp
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. Among the features of Wingdings 2 include 16 forms of the index
Index (typography)
The symbol is a punctuation mark, called an index, manicule or fist. Though rare today, this symbol was in common use between the 12th and 18th centuries in the margins of books, and was formerly included in lists of standard punctuation marks...
, Enclosed Alphanumerics from 0 to 10, multiple forms of ampersand
Ampersand
An ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction word "and". The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for "and".-Etymology:...
and interrobang
Interrobang
The interrobang, interabang , , is a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark and the exclamation mark or exclamation point . The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks...
, several geometric shapes and an asterism
Asterism (typography)
In typography, an asterism, from the Greek astēr , is a rarely used, and "nearly obsolete", symbol consisting of three asterisks placed in a triangle . It is used to, "indicate minor breaks in text," call attention to a passage, or to separate sub-chapters in a book...
. The font is not mapped to Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
.
Wingdings 3
Wingdings 3 is a TrueTypeTrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
dingbat
Dingbat
A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character"....
font
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
distributed with Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
and some other Microsoft products.
The font was originally developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. Currently, the copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
holder is Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. Wingdings 3 consists entirely of arrow
Arrow (symbol)
An arrow is a graphical symbol such as → or ←, used to point or indicate direction, being in its simplest form a line segment with a triangle affixed to one end, and in more complex forms a representation of an actual arrow...
variations.
Controversy
In 1992, only days after the release of Windows 3.1, it was discovered that the character sequence "NYC" in Wingdings was rendered as a skull and crossbones symbol, Star of DavidStar of David
The Star of David, known in Hebrew as the Shield of David or Magen David is a generally recognized symbol of Jewish identity and Judaism.Its shape is that of a hexagram, the compound of two equilateral triangles...
, and thumbs up gesture. This was often interpreted as an antisemitic message. Microsoft strongly denied this was intentional, and insisted that the final arrangement of the glyphs in the font was largely random. (The character sequence "NYC" in the later-released Webdings
Webdings
Webdings is a TrueType dingbat font developed in 1997 and included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since that time. Most of the glyphs have no Unicode character equivalents.-New York City:...
font, in turn, was intentionally rendered as eye, heart, and city skyline, referring to the I Love New York
I Love New York
I Love New York is both a logo and a song that are the basis of an advertising campaign and have been used since the mid-1970s to promote tourism in New York City, and later to promote New York State as well. The trademarked logo appears in souvenir shops and brochures throughout the state, some...
logo.)
Hoax
After September 11th, 2001, an email was sent around claiming that entering 'Q33 NY', which it claims is the flight number of the first plane to hit the Twin Towers, in Wingdings would bring up a character sequence of a plane flying into two towers, followed by the skull and crossbones symbol and the Star of David. However, this email was a hoax, as none of the planes involved in the attacks had the flight number 'Q33 NY'. (Indeed, the email itself contradicts itself, saying at one point 'The first plane crashing against the Twin Towers was flight number 11' and then 'Type in capitals Q33 NY. This is the flight number of the first plane to hit one of the Twin Towers'.) Other rumours that 'Q33 NY' was the tail or registration of one of the planes were also proved untrue.External links
- Wingdings font family information: Wingdings, (Microsoft typography)
- Font Chart for Wingdings and Webdings
- Wingdings character set and equivalent Unicode characters (Alan Wood's Unicode Resources)
- Glasner, Joanna. "MS Denies Wingding Thing, Again", Wired News. September 22, 2001. Retrieved February 9, 2006.
- Mikkelson, Barbara and David P. Snopes Urban Legends: "September 11: Wingdings", Snopes.comUrban Legends Reference PagesSnopes.com , officially the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a web site discussing urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of uncertain or questionable origin...
. December 11, 2005. Retrieved February 9, 2006. - Christensen, Brett M. Q33 NY Wingdings Hoax - Elevens and the Wrath of the Eagle, Hoax Slayer. December 2005. Retrieved May 8, 2011.