Wingdings

Wingdings

Category	Symbol
Designer(s)	Charles Bigelow Kris Holmes
Foundry	Type Solutions
Sample

Wingdings is a TrueType dingbat font included in all versions of Microsoft Windows starting with version 3.1.

This font was originally developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc., but now the copyright holder is Microsoft Corp. Further Wingdings fonts have been developed, named Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3.

Mosaic of Wingdings characters

Controversies

Wingdings has a history of 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 Skull and crossbones symbol, Star of David, and thumbs up gesture. This could be interpreted as a message of approval of killing Jews, especially those from New York City. 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, is rendered as eye, heart, and city skyline, which could be interpreted as "I Love New York City". This could be an easter egg.)

An Internet phenomenon that spread after the September 11, 2001 attacks was that if the sequence "Q33NY" is typed in Wingdings, the Q becomes an aircraft, the threes become lined documents (which resemble skyscrapers), the N becomes a skull and crossbones, and the Y becomes the Star of David. The resulting graphics look like an aircraft preparing to impact the World Trade Center, with a message of death for those of Jewish faith. The "NY" stands for New York, and "Q33" allegedly was the designation of one of the aircraft. However, the theory that this has any valid non-accidental connection with the attacks falls apart under scrutiny: the terrorist attacks were not specifically directed at Jews, and none of the aircraft used on that day bore the designation of Q33. Another suggestion was that "Q33" was a reference to a bus route, typically alleged to be at the World Trade Center itself, or to one of the airports involved. In reality, bus route Q33 serves LaGuardia Airport, and none of the hijacked aircraft took off from or were heading to there.

Various other combinations of Wingdings characters are alleged to have special significance by conspiracy theorists, but these results are likely purely coincidental (notice that similar symbols are logically grouped), providing an easy example of identifying a conspiracy by induction.

Despite these controversies, the font remained in Windows through XP and will be distributed with Windows Vista.

In 2005 the Australian singer/songwriter Justin Heazlewood, known as The Bedroom Philosopher, released the cult hit song "I’m So Postmodern" which featured the lyric: "I’m so postmodern I went home and typed up everything you said and printed it out in Wingdings and gave it back to you." The album lists the track in the Wingdings font.[1]

Uniquely among typefaces, Wingdings often inspires nostalgic or ironic humor among today's generation of students, many of whom grew up playing with the font as they experimented with Microsoft Windows computers. Ann Arbor Wingdings Club, a student group on the University of Michigan campus, is an apparent manifestation of that phenomenon.

See also

• Webdings
• Wingdings 2
• Wingdings 3

External links

• Wingdings font information (Microsoft typography)
• Mikkelson, Barbara & David P. "Wingdings: Does the Wingdings font contain hidden anti-Semitic codes?" at Snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages.
• Ann Arbor Wingdings Club
• Wingdings character set and equivalent Unicode characters (Alan Wood's Unicode Resources)