| Attribute | Wingdings | Webdings |
|---|---|---|
| Released | 1990 to 1992 | 1997 |
| Designed for | Print and office documents | Screens and the web |
| Shipped with | Windows, since Windows 3.1 | Internet Explorer 4, then Windows since 98 |
| What it contains | General icons, hands, weather, zodiac signs and checkboxes | Web and media icons, with a more modern look |
| Typeable symbols | 216 | 217 |
| Visual style | Finer, more ornamental | Solid and squared off |
Where each font came from
Wingdings came first, and it was not designed as one font. Microsoft licensed three glyph sets from type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1990, reordered them, and shipped the result with Windows 3.1 in 1992. The name blends Windows with dingbat, the printing term for a decorative ornament.
Webdings was built for a different world. By 1997 people were reading on screens, and the web needed icons that stayed legible small.
Microsoft shipped it with Internet Explorer 4, then folded it into the Core fonts for the Web, then into Windows itself from Windows 98.
Both remain Microsoft properties. The longer history covers the licensing and the controversies.
What Wingdings and Webdings each contain
Wingdings is a drawer of general-purpose ornaments. Hands, faces, zodiac signs, weather, religious symbols, checkboxes, arrows and early office icons, with no single theme running through them. It is the font people mean when they say Wingdings, and the one Undertale borrowed for Gaster's hidden dialogue.
Webdings is thematically tighter. Its uppercase runs through buildings and landscape, its lowercase through transport and public signage.
Its digits are pure interface: window controls, then the playback triangles ⏴⏵⏪︎⏩︎ every media player still uses.
Compare the same key in each. N gives 🕱 in Wingdings and 👁︎ in Webdings.
Neither font is a cipher. Both are ordinary typefaces where each key happens to draw a picture instead of a letter.
Which one are your symbols?
Look at what the symbols depict, not how they are drawn. Hands, zodiac signs, weather and checkboxes mean Wingdings. Play buttons, vehicles, little buildings and window controls mean Webdings. That one question settles almost every case in a second, without comparing the two fonts key by key.
Style is the backup tell. Webdings icons are solid and squared off; Wingdings symbols are finer and more ornamental.
Still unsure? Run the text through the translator and switch fonts. Whichever produces real words is your answer.
Mostly pointing hands or circled numbers instead? That is Wingdings 2. Almost all arrows means Wingdings 3.
Which font should you use today?
For new work, use neither as a font. Unicode 7.0 gave most of these symbols real codepoints in 2014, so you can paste the characters themselves and have them render anywhere, on any device, with nothing installed. That is what this site outputs, and it is why the symbols survive email and Google Docs.
If you do need the font itself, pick by subject. Webdings for anything interface or transport related, Wingdings for ornaments and checkboxes.
Webdings is the safer bet for documents you share. It looks less dated, and its icons survive being shrunk.
Decoding rather than writing? The Webdings tool is preset to the right map, and the full character tables list every key in both.
Wingdings and Webdings FAQ
Is Webdings just a newer Wingdings?
Webdings is not a newer Wingdings. It is a separate typeface with its own character map, not a revision of the older one. No key produces the same symbol in both, which is why decoding with the wrong font returns nonsense rather than near-misses.
Which font has more symbols?
The two fonts are almost identical in size. Wingdings carries 216 typeable symbols and Webdings 217, so neither gives you meaningfully more to work with. The difference is what those symbols depict, not how many of them there are. Pick on subject matter alone.
Do both fonts still come with Windows?
Both fonts still ship with Windows, and macOS includes them too. Wingdings has been bundled since Windows 3.1 and Webdings since Windows 98. The numbered fonts, Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3, came with Microsoft Office instead, so those two are the ones you may be missing.