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Wingdings arrived in the early 1990s as a way to add pictograms to documents without extra font switching. It quickly became a cultural curiosity.
Because the glyphs substitute letters, plain-text copies of Wingdings documents look like random symbols. That is why converters exist: the text is still there, encoded as a font mapping.
The font survives because it is fun. Symbol substitutions remain a lightweight way to add playful secrecy to a message, and the mapping is simple enough to decode.