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New York City – Hidden Meanings

For many years the Microsoft Windows operating system has been distributed with a font called Wingdings, amongst many others, as standard. This font differs from most others in that its character set is not composed of letters and numbers, but small images (icons). More recently another font called Webdings has also been added to the Microsoft Windows package. This too is comprised wholly of small graphical icons in place of the letters.

When you type NYC (New York City), and display the result in the Wingdings font, you see the following:

NYC Wingdings Font

The skull and cross-bones, the star of Judaism, and the thumbs-up have collectively been interpreted as the anti-semitic message: Death to Jews, OK.

Things get even more interesting when you display NYC in the Webdings font. Here is the result:

NYC Wingdings Font

An eye, a heart, and a Manhatten skyline: I love New York. This rather interesting result may not be the coincidence that it seems. Some believe that Microsoft's font designers responsible for Webdings were well aware of what NYC spelled out in Wingdings, and purposely assigned the above symbols to the characters N, Y, and C in the new font they were creating.

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