Morse Code Translator
Type text and get International Morse code, or paste dots and dashes and get text back. Letters are separated by a space and words by a slash, the convention used in most Morse references. Press Play to hear the result at about 15 words per minute.
How to use the morse code translator
- Type or paste text in the box. The Morse code appears as you type.
- To decode, switch to Morse to text and paste dots and dashes. Separate letters with a space and words with a slash.
- Press Play to hear the code at about 15 words per minute.
- Copy the result with the copy button.
Examples
| SOS | ... --- ... |
| Hello, World! | .... . .-.. .-.. --- --..-- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. -.-.-- |
| Meet me at 7:30 | -- . . - / -- . / .- - / --... ---... ...-- ----- |
About Morse code
Morse code represents each letter, digit and punctuation mark as a sequence of short and long signals, the dots and dashes. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail built the first version for the electric telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s, and it was reshaped in Europe over the following decades into the International Morse code that is still defined today by the International Telecommunication Union in Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1. That standard fixes the codes for 26 letters, 10 digits and a set of punctuation marks, and it fixes the timing: a dash is three times the length of a dot, the signals within a letter are separated by one dot length, letters by three, and words by seven. Everything else about Morse, from the sound of a shipboard telegraph to the flashing of a signal lamp, follows from those two lists, and a message sent by either is read by the same rules.
The letters are not assigned at random. Morse gave the shortest codes to the most frequent letters in English, counting the type in a printer's case to find out which they were: E is a single dot, T a single dash, and rarer letters such as Q and Y take four signals. That is why a Morse message is shorter to send than the same text in a fixed-length code, and why an operator hears rhythms rather than individual dots. Speed is measured in words per minute using the word PARIS, which takes exactly 50 dot lengths including its trailing word gap; a dot of 80 milliseconds, the length this page uses, works out to 15 words per minute, a comfortable speed for someone learning to copy by ear.
This translator encodes text to Morse and decodes Morse to text. Going in, every letter, digit and the punctuation marks in the ITU table are converted: period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, colon, semicolon, hyphen, slash, parentheses, quotation mark, apostrophe, the at sign, the equals sign and plus. Case does not exist in Morse, so capitals and lowercase give the same code. Each character's code is separated from the next by a single space and each word is separated by a space, a slash and a space, which is how most charts and practice sheets write it. Accented letters are folded to their plain form first, so é is sent as E, and any character with no code passes through unchanged rather than being dropped.
Going out, the decoder is forgiving about notation, because Morse that has been copied from a book, a message or a puzzle rarely arrives as clean ASCII. It accepts the middle dot and bullet as dots, and the minus sign, en dash, em dash and underscore as dashes. Words may be separated by a slash or by a run of three or more spaces. Any group it cannot recognize becomes a question mark in the output, so a mistyped code shows you where the problem is instead of silently disappearing. Decoded text comes back in lowercase, since the code carries no capitals.
The Play button sounds the Morse in your browser with the Web Audio API, using the ITU timing: an 80 millisecond dot, a dash of three dots, one dot between signals, three between letters and seven between words. No audio file is downloaded and nothing you type leaves your device. Hearing the code matters more than seeing it if you want to learn Morse, because operators learn the sound of each letter as a whole, not the count of its dots. Type a few words, listen, then try to decode by ear before reading the dots and dashes on the screen.
Frequently asked questions
How are letters and words separated in the output?
Each letter's code is followed by one space, and words are separated by a space, a slash and another space, so "hi there" becomes ".... .. / - .... . .-. .". This is the notation most Morse charts and training sheets use. The Play button converts those separators into the ITU gaps: three dot lengths between letters and seven between words.
Which Morse standard does this use?
International Morse code as defined in ITU-R M.1677-1, the version used worldwide in radio, aviation and amateur radio. It differs from the original American Morse of the 1840s, which had internal spaces inside some letters and is no longer in use. The letters, digits and punctuation here follow the ITU table.
Can it decode Morse code that uses different symbols?
Yes. The decoder treats the middle dot and bullet as dots, and the minus sign, en dash, em dash and underscore as dashes, since these are what word processors and web pages often substitute. Word breaks can be a slash or three or more spaces. Anything it cannot match comes out as a question mark so you can find the faulty group.
How fast does the Play button send?
About 15 words per minute, using a dot of 80 milliseconds and the standard ratios: a dash is three dot lengths, letters are separated by three and words by seven. The sound is generated in your browser with the Web Audio API, so no file is loaded and the audio works offline once the page is open.
Does it handle accented letters or emoji?
Not as Morse. Letters with accents are folded to their base letter, so ñ is sent as N and é as E, because the international table has no separate codes for most of them. Characters with no code at all, such as emoji or non-Latin letters, are passed through unchanged. Case is also lost: Morse has no capitals, and decoded text comes back in lowercase.
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