Morse Code Translator

Morse is a rhythm, which is why reading it off a screen never works

Every guide to learning Morse says the same thing and every beginner ignores it: do not learn the dots and dashes as shapes. A person receiving Morse is not looking at .-.. and counting marks, they are hearing di-dah-di-dit as one sound with one length, the way you hear a word rather than a row of letters. Learn it visually and you build a lookup step that has to be unlearned later, at around ten words a minute, when there is no longer time to count anything.

That is the whole reason this page leads with the player rather than a text box. The written line is the transcription; the sound is the code. The oscillator here runs at 600 Hz by default, near the pitch most operators set their receivers to, and the speed slider covers 5 to 40 words per minute — 5 for picking a letter apart, 20 for the speed most amateur licence tests use, 40 for what a practised contest operator copies in their head while writing down the last callsign.

The timing is the ITU's, not an approximation. A dah is exactly three dits long, the gap inside a letter is one dit, between letters three, between words seven, and words-per-minute is calibrated against PARIS — the standard fifty-dit word — so 20 WPM really is a 60 millisecond dit and not merely something that feels about right. Speed changes the dit length and nothing else; the ratios never move, because the ratios are what makes it Morse.

The table is the ITU-R M.1677-1 alphabet, which includes punctuation most charts drop and a handful of accented letters English speakers never meet. The prosigns are listed separately because they are not letters at all: <AR> is di-dah-di-dah-dit, exactly the same marks as A followed by R, and only the missing gap between them says it means end of message rather than the letters. Type them in angle brackets and they encode as one unbroken symbol.

SOS, the one everybody knows

SOS

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The ITU Morse alphabet

Letters, digits and the punctuation the recommendation actually defines. A slash between symbols is a word gap; three or more spaces means the same thing, because pasted Morse from three sites uses three conventions.

Prosigns

Procedural signals, not letters. Each is sent as one unbroken symbol — type them in angle brackets and they encode as one.

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