Why wingdings exist

When using a printing press, printers needed a shortcut when it came to ornamenting their text. Every figure or letter had to be hand-carved and laid out before anything could be printed, so it was too laborious to make a new template for every drawing or figure.

Enter dingbats. These tiny pieces included a variety of reusable shapes that could be slotted into text and used as ornamentation in a book. The same way a Wingdings user might slot in a Wingding mailbox while asking for an RSVP, an analog printer could use a dingbat to quickly add some flair to a page. As for where the "dingbats" name came from, nobody knows for sure.

Bigelow notes another possible origin: "dingus," a Dutch word for thing. It could also be an onomatopoeic invention, like the sound of a piece of metal type falling on the floor. The history of character fonts goes back even further than the dingbat. Bigelow, who taught Concepts of Text at Stanford, among other courses, sees a long through line from ancient text to the present. After all, he notes, it's possible to trace even the letter "A" to a picture of an ox head 3, years ago.

That ancient use of pictures has continued to the modern era. The future of fonts like Wingdings, which occupy a weird space between pictures and text, is impossible to predict. Will emojis become the main means of communication? Will people ditch text altogether? If so, make sure you know your Wingdings well — you're going to need that mailbox. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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Why the Wingdings font exists. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Wingdings is the font made entirely out of symbols. But why? The below is just a brief example of Wingdings weirdness: Wingdings and friends. Vox But Wingdings is much more than just a quirky font.

And when you delve into how Wingdings was born, it becomes clear why it become so iconic. Who made Wingdings — and why Wingdings came from somewhere. Vox As a means of writing sentences, Wingdings fails — but that was never its purpose. Microsoft includes Wingdings with Windows Bill Gates in Related The reason every meme uses that one font.

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It was a bit like emojis, but way more useful. It used to be much harder to use pictures from the internet. Images were difficult to find and too large to download, and they didn't play nicely next to text. As a solution, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes invented Wingdings to create a way to use images quickly and easily, that would harmonise with text.

ShortList is supported by you, our amazing readers. When you click through the links on our site and make a purchase we may earn a commission. Learn more. This is the real, surprising reason why the Wingdings font exists Ahh, that makes sense. By Nick Pope. But there's a bit more to it than that, so have a gander at the video below Latest Computing. MacBook Pro and Air get upgraded.

Return of the Mac.