A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character".
The term continued to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that had symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters.
An example of dingbat font:
✁ ✂ ✃ ✄ ☎ ✆ ✇ ✈ ✉ ☛ ☞ ✌ ✍ ✎ ✏
✐ ✑ ✒ ✓ ✔ ✕ ✖ ✗ ✘ ✙ ✚ ✛ ✜ ✝ ✞ ✟
✠ ✡ ✢ ✣ ✤ ✥ ✦ ✧ ★ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯
✰ ✱ ✲ ✳ ✴ ✵ ✶ ✷ ✸ ✹ ✺ ✻ ✼ ✽ ✾ ✿
❀ ❁ ❂ ❃ ❄ ❅ ❆ ❇ ❈ ❉ ❊ ❋ ● ❍ ■ ❏
❐ ❑ ❒ ▲ ▼ ◆ ❖ ◗ ❘ ❙ ❚ ❛ ❜ ❝ ❞
Some web browsers may not render the above correctly, showing instead boxes or question marks.
The advent of Unicode and the universal character set it provides allowed commonly-used dingbats to be given their own character codes, from 2700 to 27BF. Although fonts claiming Unicode coverage will contain glyphs for dingbats in addition to alphabetic characters, fonts that have dingbats in place of alphabetic characters continue to be popular, primarily for ease of input. Read more about dingbat fonts on Wikipedia.
