Before emoji existed — in fact before the Unicode standard that makes emojis possible existed — in fact before computers existed — if you needed to include an ornament or symbol in something printed, you might use a “dingbat”. ✰, ✔︎, and ☞ are dingbats. Things like these: ❀ ✾ are generally called dingbats too, but more technically they’re “fleurets.” “Dingbat” has been used to mean quite a few other things as well.
It first appeared in the early 1800s, and while early usage had nothing to do with printing, it’s sometimes difficult to know just what it did mean. For example, in this, from 1838, what are they talking about? “We can take a ‘Quaker’ before we start—apply a ‘Ding Bat’ at Providence.” One guess is money, since that was one of the most common early meanings of “dingbat”. This quote from 1863 makes it clear: “I paid for my Kissingen in five-cent ‘dingbat’ or ‘spondulick’—two of the many names given to the fractional currency.”
In 1877, in an attempt to clear up any misconceptions, the Dictionary of Americanisms defined the word: “Dingbat, a bat of wood that may be thrown (dinged); a piece of money; a cannon-ball; a bullet.” Evidently that wasn’t inclusive enough for Philip Hale, though. In 1895 he published this list of what “dingbat” might mean: “(1) Balls of dung on buttocks of sheep or cattle. (2) Blow or slap on the buttocks. (3) Flying missile. (4) Squabble of words or pushing. (5) Money. (6) In some of the N.E. schools, the word is student slang for various kinds of muffins or biscuit. (7) Affectionate embrace of mothers hugging and kissing their children. (8) Term of admiration.”
By the early 1900s, “dingbat” was used to mean someone foolish or idiotic. It could also be a nonspecific insult: “The boss called Ralph a dingbat because he made fun of him” (1915). A couple of decades later, “dingbat” meant a gadget, contraption, or just an odd object: “It is sitting on a strange and almost indescribable sort of iron dingbat.”
It was also in the early 1900s that printers started to use the term for ornamental characters and patterns. At the time they meant the printed symbols, the lead type used, and the whole set of such symbols the print shop had available. That’s the source of the name “dingbats” for the computerized font collections of ornamental characters, like Zapf Dingbats. The Zapf, by the way, is Hermann Zapf, who designed fonts. Besides Zapf Dingbats, he designed the Palatino and Optima typefaces. He was born in 1915, so for the first decades of his career he was designing type to be cast in metal and coated with ink. But he kept at it long enough to see his typefaces reproduced in computers, which, for all we know, he might have described as “those electronic dingbats they’re putting on everyone’s desk now.”
