The coat of arms of the city of Wiesbaden shows three yellow (gold-colored) lilies on a blue shield. The origin and circumstances of its symbolization were disputed until the early 20th century, as the city coat of arms and the seal image had been repeatedly mixed up in the past. By resolution of May 3, 1905, the city council declared the image, which was first created in the form of a seal, to be Wiesbaden's official emblem.

While the coat of arms, whose historical meaning goes back to the Old German word "wafen", became the term for the identification mark of its bearer applied to the shield in the course of the 14th century, the seal (Latin "sigillum") already had an existential meaning in the early Middle Ages as a sign of the authentication of a document.

The oldest known seal of the city of Wiesbaden shows the Nassau lion on a shield with twelve shingles and has been preserved in imprints since 1324. The fleurs-de-lys are found in the current position of 2:1 for the first time in 1513 and 1522 in the court seal of the time, a semicircular shield with three fleurs-de-lys, in the middle of which the Nassau lion with the shingles is still depicted. In 1547, 1552 and 1561, Wiesbaden was almost completely reduced to ashes by fires. At the Imperial Diet in Frankfurt am Main in 1562, Count Philipp the Young Lord of Nassau-Idstein-Wiesbaden asked Emperor Ferdinand I to renew the city's old privileges, as all the old documents had been burnt. In this request, he mentions, among other things, that Wiesbaden had received the coat of arms with the three yellow lilies on a blue field from Charlemagne and that it resembled the French coat of arms.

The three-lily coat of arms, almost identical in form to the present one, first appears on a half rosette from 1592, which was probably placed in the arch filling above the Stumpfen Tor gate on Michelsberg, which was demolished in 1817. Subsequently, the three lilies were used as the town's coat of arms in Merian's view of 1646 and in the numerous views of the town from the 18th century. Renkhoff interprets the coat of arms from Wiesbaden's city history: the lilies "were regarded by the city and the count as a sign of royal protection and as the coat of arms of Charlemagne, who was believed to be the founder of the city". The lily coat of arms symbolizes the historical significance of the city, its royal past, its character as an imperial city in Hohenstaufen times and its status as a fief of the empire.