Morse Code Translator
The chart
Spacing is the whole grammar
Morse has only two symbols, so everything else is carried by silence. A dot is one unit and a dash
is three. Between the parts of a letter there is one unit of silence, between letters three, and
between words seven. Get those gaps wrong and the message decodes into something else entirely —
.- .- is AA, while .-.- is not a letter at all.
In writing, a single space separates letters and a forward slash separates words. That convention exists precisely because a reader cannot hear the difference between a three-unit and a seven-unit gap on a page.
Why speed is measured against PARIS
The word PARIS takes exactly 50 units to send, including the gap that follows it, so sending it twelve times in a minute is 12 words per minute by definition. It is an arbitrary-looking standard that turns out to be very practical: it makes speeds comparable regardless of what is being sent. At 20 wpm a dot lasts 60 milliseconds.
What Morse cannot carry
- Case. There is no lower case — everything is sent as capitals.
- Most punctuation. Only the marks in the chart above have codes.
- Anything outside the Latin alphabet. Devanagari, accented letters and emoji have no Morse equivalent, and are skipped here rather than guessed at.
SOS is one symbol, not three letters
It is sent as a continuous ...---... with no letter gaps — a prosign chosen because it
is unmistakable, not because the letters stand for anything. "Save Our Souls" was invented
afterwards to explain it.
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Frequently Asked Questions
With a forward slash, which is the usual written convention: <code>... --- ...</code> is SOS as one word, while <code>.... .. / - .... . .-. .</code> is two. In sound the gap does the work — three units of silence between letters, seven between words — but on paper the slash makes it unambiguous.
Almost always spacing. Letters need a single space between them and words need a slash or a wider gap; without that, <code>.- .-</code> (AA) and <code>.-.-</code> (a different sequence) look the same to a reader and to this tool. It also only handles the letters, digits and punctuation in the chart below — anything else is passed through unchanged and marked.
Words per minute, measured the standard way against the word PARIS, which is exactly 50 units of Morse. At 20 wpm a dot lasts 60 milliseconds. Beginners usually learn at 5 to 13 wpm; amateur radio operators commonly work at 20 to 25.
Yes, though rarely as a required skill. Amateur radio operators use it because it gets through when voice cannot, aviation and maritime beacons still identify themselves in Morse, and it remains a practical fallback for signalling by light or sound.
Because it is a prosign, not three letters — it is sent as one continuous symbol, <code>...---...</code>. Written as separate letters it would still be understood, but the run-together form is what makes it recognisable.
No. The translation and the sound both happen in your browser.