The reverse direction reads those symbols back to letters. It only knows the letters, digits and the symbols in this map. It is not a general picture-to-text tool.
How to use
- Type English, or paste symbols you got from this page.
- Choose English to symbols, or symbols to English.
- Press Translate. Letters with no mapping are copied and named.
Formula / how it works
The map is the font’s published equivalents, not a private cipher. Upper-case A is the victory hand, B the OK hand, C thumbs up, and so on through Z as a star and crescent. Lower-case a–i are the zodiac signs from Cancer through Pisces. The rest of the lower-case letters are shapes: a black circle, squares, diamonds, a command mark. Digits 0–9 are the folder, the open folder, the page, and the other office symbols Wingdings put on those keys. The pairs come from the Unicode assignments for those glyphs. They are not “whatever emoji looks close”.
Case matters. C and c are different symbols. A word typed in capitals will not match a word typed in small letters, and the reverse direction restores the case that the symbol was mapped from. “Cafe” becomes thumbs-up, Cancer, Sagittarius, Scorpio. Feeding those four symbols back returns Cafe with that capital C.
What is left alone. Space and line breaks pass through. Punctuation, emoji you did not get from this map, and accented letters are copied and listed under “No Wingdings equivalent” or “Not in the letter map”. The list is how you notice a character the font never had a letter for. The Unicode converter shows the code point of a single character if you need to identify a symbol that this map skipped.
Direction. English to symbols walks each character through the forward table. Symbols to English walks each symbol through the reverse table. A string of ordinary letters in the reverse direction comes back unchanged and every letter is listed as not in the map, which is the signal that you still have English selected the wrong way. Switch direction rather than reading that list as a translation.
What this is not. It does not embed the Wingdings font, and it does not make a document that requires Wingdings to open. Installing the font and typing A is a different technique: recipients without the font see A, not a hand. The symbols here stay symbols. Some of them are colourful emoji on modern phones and black-and-white dingbats on others. The identity of the character is what the translator guarantees, not the colour a vendor’s font chooses.
Length. Two hundred characters is the cap. A long run of emoji is heavy to select. Translate the word you need, not a page.
Worked examples
Cafe into symbols
Inputs: Text: Cafe | Direction: to
Type Cafe and set the direction to English-to-symbols, using the value to. C and the three small letters use four different symbols.
Result: Direction: English to symbols
Symbols: 👍♋♐♏
No Wingdings equivalent: none
The reverse of that symbol string is Cafe again.
Symbols back to Cafe’s first two letters
Inputs: Text: 👍♋ | Direction: from
Paste 👍♋ into the box and set the direction from symbols back to English. Those two symbols are C and a.
Result: Direction: symbols to English
English: Ca
Not in the letter map: none
Use cases
- Replacing a letter with the Wingdings symbol that the font would have drawn.
- Reading a symbol string that this page produced earlier.
- Checking that a capital and its small letter are not the same symbol.
- Seeing which punctuation has no letter in the map.
Tips & limitations
- Match case. C and c are different symbols.
- Use the reverse direction only on symbols from this map.
- Do not expect a phone and a desktop to colour the emoji the same way.
- Look up a single unknown mark in the Unicode converter.
FAQ
Do I need the Wingdings font installed?
No. The result is Unicode symbols. Recipients do not need the font to see a hand or a star.
Why is a capital not the same symbol as the small letter?
Wingdings assigned different glyphs to A and a. The translator keeps that distinction.
Can it read any emoji?
No. Only symbols that appear in this letter and digit map. Other emoji are copied and named as not in the map.
What do the digits become?
The office pictures Wingdings put on the number keys: folders, pages, a cabinet, an hourglass, and the keyboard, mouse and trackball pictures.
Why did English come back unchanged?
The direction was symbols-to-English, and letters are not symbols in the reverse table. Switch to English-to-symbols.
Is the text uploaded?
No. The substitution runs in the browser.
Runs entirely in your browser; your text is not uploaded. Counts and scores are heuristics, so review the output before you publish it.