Dingbat
A dingbat is a decoration or a spacer used in typesetting in the earlier days; these are often termed as the printer's ornament. This term apparently originated as onomatopoeia in old style metal-type print shops, where extra space around text or illustrations would be filled by dinging an ornament into the space and after that bating tight to be ready for inking.
This old term continued to be used in the computer industry presently to portray the fonts that usually has the symbols and shapes in the designated locations for different alphabetical or numeric characters. Sometimes there is a problem of the browser support as some of the web browsers do not deliver the symbols and shapes correctly, showing instead boxes or question marks.
With the arrival of Unicode and the universal character set, things have somewhat changed and now the browsers provide 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.
The most popular examples of dingbat typefaces are Wingdings and Webdings. Another famous dingbat typeface is Zapf Dingbats. Also look at the old english font homepage for other articles.