Article Wingdings Prophecies
Summary: Conspiracy theorists claimed that anti-semitic messages were hidden in a font created by Microsoft.
Wingdings are the funny looking fonts in Microsoft Word—the ones with symbols and pictures instead of letters. Each symbol corresponds to a different letter. In the early 1990s rumors alleged the existence of anti-semitic messages coded into wingdings. The cause of these allegations was the fact that if you typed the letters NYC using wingdings, you got a skull and crossbones, a star of David, and a thumbs up symbol:
Conspiracy theorists claimed that Microsoft programmers had deliberately designed this into the font as a way of urging people to kill New York City Jews. Microsoft, of course, denied these allegations.
September 11, 2001
The wingdings controversy came roaring back with a vengeance after 9/11, when an email began to circulate claiming that wingdings had predicted or forewarned of the attack on the World Trade Center. The rumor alleged that if you type Q33NY using wingdings (Q33NY supposedly being the flight number of one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center) you would see a picture that looked like a plane flying towards two building towers followed by a skull and crossbones and the star of David.:
However, in reality Q33NY was not the flight number of any of the hijacked planes. Their flight numbers were 11 and 175. Q33NY was completely meaningless. It was simply what needed to be typed in wingdings in order to get a plane and two buildings to appear.
Because of all the fuss about secret messages appearing in wingdings, when Microsoft designed the successor to wingdings in the late 90s, Webdings, they deliberately ensured that a happy message would appear when the letters NYC were typed. Try it out yourself if you have a copy of Word. This is what you get:
