What Are Unicode Dingbats? The Complete Guide to U+2700-U+27BF

You’ve seen them everywhere; check marks on to-do lists, scissors on dotted lines, stars in product reviews, and little airplanes on boarding passes.

These aren’t random clip art. They’re dingbats, a collection of decorative symbols with roots that stretch back centuries through the history of printing. And thanks to Unicode, they now have permanent addresses in the digital world.

This guide will walk you through what Unicode dingbats are, where they came from, how they ended up in the Unicode Standard, and exactly how you can use them yourself.

Explore Every Dingbat in the Unicode Block

Click any symbol below to learn its full story, including its name, Unicode code point, history, and how to type it on your device.

This keyboard covers every character in the Dingbats block (U+2700-U+27BF), so if you’ve spotted a symbol and want to know more, just find it and tap.

What Are Dingbats

A dingbat is a decorative symbol or ornament used in typesetting. The term covers everything from simple check marks and arrows to elaborate floral designs and pointing hands. In traditional printing, dingbats served practical purposes: they separated sections of text (acting as a “dinkus”), created decorative borders, and marked the beginnings or endings of chapters.

The word “dingbat” itself has a quirky history. It’s been used since the 19th century as informal slang for various objects, and printers eventually adopted it to describe the small ornamental characters they kept in their type cases alongside regular letters and numbers. Think of dingbats as the original emoji; tiny pictures that add meaning, emphasis, or visual flair to a page of text.

In the computer era, dingbats took on a new identity. Early operating systems had limited character sets, so font designers created special “dingbat fonts” that placed symbols where letters would normally go.

Type the letter “a” in a dingbat font, and you’d get a star or a snowflake instead. This clever workaround gave designers access to hundreds of useful symbols without requiring any changes to the underlying software.

From Printer’s Ornaments to Digital Icons

Dingbats didn’t appear out of nowhere. They evolved from a long tradition of printer’s ornaments that dates back to the earliest days of movable type in the 15th century.

The Gutenberg Era and Beyond

Early printers used hand-carved woodblocks to add decorative elements to their pages. These ornaments included fleurons (floral designs), manicules (pointing hands), and various geometric shapes.

Printers treasured their ornament collections because they allowed each shop to give its books a distinctive look. Over the centuries, these ornaments became standardized, and type foundries began including them alongside their letter sets.

The Phototypesetting Revolution

By the mid-20th century, phototypesetting replaced metal type, and ornamental characters made the leap to film strips and discs. Designers could now access symbols more easily, but the real explosion came with desktop publishing in the 1980s. Suddenly, anyone with a personal computer and a laser printer could set type, and they wanted symbols to go along with it.

The Digital Leap

When Apple released the LaserWriter in 1985, it shipped with 35 built-in PostScript fonts. One of them was ITC Zapf Dingbats. For the first time, a massive audience of non-professional designers had instant access to a polished set of decorative symbols. The dingbat went mainstream.

Hermann Zapf and the Dingbats That Changed Everything

The story of modern dingbats belongs to one person more than any other: Hermann Zapf (1918-2015), the legendary German type designer behind Palatino, Optima, and Zapfino.

In 1977, Zapf sat down and sketched over 1,000 symbols, ornaments, and decorative elements. He drew from centuries of printing history, pulling in everything from traditional fleurons and pointing hands to modern icons like scissors, telephones, and airplanes.

The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) reviewed his massive collection and selected 360 of the best designs. They released them in 1978 as ITC Zapf Dingbats, divided into three series of 120 symbols each: the 100, 200, and 300 series.

The 100 series became the most widely used. It included check marks, crosses, stars, scissors, pencils, envelopes, and arrows. When Steve Jobs chose ITC Zapf Dingbats as one of the standard fonts for Apple’s LaserWriter in 1985, the 100 series went from being a professional typographer’s tool to something millions of people could access from their home computers.

Zapf’s dingbats were so well designed and so widely adopted that they became the foundation for an entire Unicode block. His artistic vision, rooted in centuries of typographic tradition, lives on every time you insert a check mark or star into a document.

The Unicode Dingbats Block (U+2700-U+27BF)

When the Unicode Consortium set out to create a universal character encoding standard in the late 1980s, they recognized that Zapf’s dingbats had become a de facto standard for decorative symbols. So in October 1991, with the release of Unicode 1.0, they added the Dingbats block spanning code points U+2700 through U+27BF. The block was originally named “Zapf Dingbats” in honor of its source material; the name was shortened to simply “Dingbats” in June 1993 with the release of Unicode 1.1.

The block contains 192 characters, and the vast majority trace directly back to Zapf’s ITC series 100. Having dedicated Unicode code points means these symbols are no longer tied to any specific font.

You can type a check mark (✓, U+2713) in any Unicode-compatible application, and it will display correctly regardless of which font you’re using. That’s a huge improvement over the old days, when switching fonts could turn your carefully placed symbols into random letters.

Here’s a look at the major categories of symbols you’ll find inside the Dingbats block.

How to Use Dingbats on Any Device

One of the best things about Unicode dingbats is that you can insert them on virtually any modern device. Here are the most common methods, organized by platform.

For web developers, the simplest approach is using HTML numeric entities. Every dingbat in the U+2700-U+27BF range can be rendered by converting the hex code point to decimal and wrapping it in &# and ;. For example, the heavy check mark (U+2714) becomes ✔ in HTML.

Dingbats That Became Emoji

Here’s something that surprises a lot of people: 33 characters in the Dingbats block are also classified as emoji. When the Unicode Consortium began formalizing emoji in the late 2000s, they didn’t start from scratch. They looked at symbols that were already widely used in digital communication, and many of those lived in the Dingbats block.

The heavy black heart ❤ (U+2764) is one of the most recognizable examples. It existed as a plain dingbat for years before it gained emoji status and the ability to render in color on phones and tablets.

The same goes for the check mark ✅ (U+2705), the sparkles ✨ (U+2728), and the airplane ✈ (U+2708). These symbols now support variant selectors, which means your device can display them either as simple black-and-white glyphs (text presentation) or as colorful emoji (emoji presentation), depending on the context.

This dual identity makes dingbats uniquely versatile. Need a professional-looking check mark in a business document? Use the text presentation. Want a fun, colorful heart in a text message? The same code point delivers, just with the emoji presentation applied.

Beyond the Core Block

The original Dingbats block at U+2700-U+27BF isn’t the only home for decorative symbols in Unicode. In June 2014, Unicode 7.0 introduced the Ornamental Dingbats block (U+1F650-U+1F67F), adding 48 more characters. This newer block includes ornamental leaves, decorative ampersands, quilt square patterns, and checkerboard designs. It also pulled in symbols from Webdings and Wingdings, two dingbat fonts that Microsoft had popularized in the 1990s.

Together, these blocks give you access to well over 200 dedicated dingbat characters, all with standardized code points that work across every modern operating system, browser, and application.

Fun Facts About Dingbats

Dingbats have a few stories worth knowing about.

• In 1994, magazine editor David Carson set an entire interview with musician Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats, making the whole article unreadable. His reason? He found the interview boring and figured the symbols would make it more interesting. In 2007, a creative agency posted job advertisements written entirely in Wingdings, Webdings, and Zapf Dingbats. The hidden message read: “If you can read this, you’re hired!”
• The Dingbats block was the first Unicode block to import characters directly from a specific commercial typeface. That honor belongs to Zapf’s designs. The Unicode Consortium later adopted a policy requiring symbols to have a demonstrated need for plain-text exchange before being encoded, which is why no other dingbat fonts were added until Webdings and Wingdings were incorporated in Unicode 7.0.
• And if you’ve ever wondered why there are four different scissors symbols in Unicode (✀ ✁ ✂ ✃), you can thank Zapf’s thoroughness. Each one represents a different orientation of the blades, giving designers options for “cut here” lines that face different directions.

Now You Know Your Dingbats

What started as hand-carved printer’s ornaments in the 15th century became Hermann Zapf’s elegant symbol collection in 1978, and then a permanent part of the Unicode Standard in 1991.

Every time you drop a ✓ into a checklist or send a ❤ in a message, you’re using a piece of typographic history. If someone you know has ever asked “what are all those little symbols called?”, now you’ve got the answer; send this their way.