Morse Code Translator

What is Morse code?

So, what is Morse code, really? It is a way of writing letters and numbers using just two things, a short signal and a long signal. The short one is a dot, the long one is a dash. You will also hear people call them dits and dahs, which is just how they sound when you tap them out. String a few together and you have got a letter. Put letters next to each other with small gaps and you have got a word. That is the whole idea.

One thing that surprises people is that Morse has no upper case or lower case. A and a are the exact same dots and dashes, so you can forget about your shift key. It started back in the 1830s for sending messages down telegraph wires, and the version almost everyone uses today is called International Morse code. More on that further down.

How this translator works

So here is the nice part, you do not have to learn any of this to use the tool. You just type. Put your normal text in the Text box and the dots and dashes appear in the Morse Code box. Already have some Morse? Paste it into the Morse Code box instead and your plain text shows up on the other side. It works both ways and it updates as you type, so there is no convert button to press.

A couple of things to know about the output. A single space separates each letter, and a forward slash / separates each word, so the spacing stays easy to read. If you type a character the code does not have a symbol for, you will see a # in its place, which is just the tool saying it does not have that one. And if your Morse has a sequence that does not match any letter, the box flags it so you know to take another look.

Under the hood, this runs on a small open source JavaScript library called morse-decoder. The part that matters for you is that all of it happens right here in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, so you can paste whatever you like.

How to use it

Using it takes about five seconds:

1. To turn text into Morse, click the Text box and start typing. The Morse appears on the other side as you go.
2. To turn Morse back into text, click the Morse Code box and type or paste your dots and dashes. Keep a space between letters and a slash between words.
3. Copy whichever side you need, and you are done.

That is really it. If Morse is something you reach for now and then, feel free to bookmark this page so it is easy to find later.

A quick example

Let us do the most famous one, SOS. S is three dots, O is three dashes, S is three dots again. Put them together and you get:

... --- ...

Funny enough, SOS was not picked because it stands for something. There was no Save Our Ship or Save Our Souls, those came later. It was chosen simply because ... --- ... is so short and so easy to recognise that even someone who barely knows Morse can spot it.

Here is a friendlier one, the word HELLO:

.... . .-.. .-.. ---

Try typing either of these into the box above and watch it line up.

The full Morse code chart

Here is the full set the translator uses, the letters, the numbers, and the common punctuation. This is standard International Morse code, the same chart used on the radio.

Dots, dashes and the gaps in between

If you ever want to actually send Morse out loud, by tapping, beeping or flashing a light, the timing is what makes it readable. It all comes down to one unit of time, and everything is measured against it:

• A dot is one unit long.
• A dash is three units long.
• The gap between the dots and dashes inside a single letter is one unit.
• The gap between two letters is three units.
• The gap between two words is seven units.

Those numbers are not something I made up. They come straight from the international standard that actually defines Morse code, ITU-R Recommendation M.1677-1. Keep that rhythm steady and your Morse is easy to follow. Rush the gaps and it turns into mush.

People who use Morse a lot, like ham radio operators, measure their speed in words per minute, and by long tradition they use the word PARIS as the yardstick for one average word. If you ever want the maths, the length of one dot in milliseconds is 1200 divided by the words per minute. So 20 words per minute works out to a 60 millisecond dot.

Where Morse code is still used

You might think Morse code is a museum piece. It is not. It is still quietly doing its job in a few places.

Pilots and sailors still lean on it. The navigation beacons that guide aircraft, known as VORs and NDBs, identify themselves by beeping out two or three letters in Morse, so a pilot can confirm they have tuned to the right one.

Ham radio operators love it. A faint Morse signal can punch through when a voice is too weak to make out, which is why it is still popular for long distance contacts and for emergencies when conditions are bad.

It is also a genuine lifeline. The SOS distress signal is Morse, and people have called for rescue by flashing a torch, or even blinking their eyes in Morse, when nothing else was available.

And it helps with accessibility. Because Morse needs only one kind of input, a single button, a puff of air, a blink, it can give people with limited movement a way to type and communicate.

So it is old, but it is far from dead. It just settled into the jobs it is still best at.

International vs American, and what this tool supports

One quick thing worth knowing. There is more than one Morse code. The original one Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail used on American telegraph lines is now called American Morse code, and it is a little different. The one the rest of the world settled on, and the one this tool uses, is International Morse code. Unless someone tells you otherwise, International is the one you want.

As for what you can translate here, the tool covers the full A to Z, the numbers 0 to 9, and the common punctuation you saw in the chart. It is also happy with accented letters, and it even handles a few non Latin alphabets like Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Japanese kana, since the library behind it knows those too. When you decode, it reads the dots and dashes as the standard International letters by default. And as mentioned, anything it does not recognise comes back as a #, so you always know exactly what got skipped.

Questions people ask

References

1. International Telecommunication Union. Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1: International Morse code (2009). https://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-M.1677-1-200910-I/
2. Wikipedia. Words per minute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute