💡 Tip: press Play. Morse is a sound before it is a pattern on a page, and the dots and dashes only start to make sense once you have heard the rhythm — a dash lasts three times as long as a dot, and that ratio is the whole code. The tone is generated in your browser; nothing is downloaded.
🧭 User Guide
- Type in either box. Plain text at the top becomes Morse below as you type, and Morse pasted into the lower box is read back into text.
- Press Play to hear it. The lamp flashes in time with the tone, so the timing is visible as well as audible.
- Set the speed in words per minute. Five is a crawl, eighteen is a comfortable learning pace, forty is faster than most operators ever send.
- Use the second slider for Farnsworth spacing if you are learning: the letters stay quick while the gaps between them stretch, which is the method that actually works.
- Insert a prosign from the row of buttons — SOS, AR, SK and the rest are single symbols, not spellings.
- Copy or download the result, or clear both boxes and start again.
📡 The alphabet and the numbers
The whole International Morse code for letters and digits.
| Letter | Code | Letter | Code | Number | Code |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | .- | N | -. | 0 | —– |
| B | -… | O | — | 1 | .—- |
| C | -.-. | P | .–. | 2 | ..— |
| D | -.. | Q | –.- | 3 | …– |
| E | . | R | .-. | 4 | ….- |
| F | ..-. | S | … | 5 | ….. |
| G | –. | T | – | 6 | -…. |
| H | …. | U | ..- | 7 | –… |
| I | .. | V | …- | 8 | —.. |
| J | .— | W | .– | 9 | —-. |
| K | -.- | X | -..- | ||
| L | .-.. | Y | -.– | ||
| M | — | Z | –.. |
⏱ What the timing actually means
Four durations, fixed in ratio to one another. Everything else follows.
One unit, three units
A dot is one unit long. A dash is three.
There is no absolute length — a unit can be a fifth of a second or a twentieth — only the ratio matters. That is why two operators sending at wildly different speeds can both be understood, and why a beginner sending dashes barely longer than dots is unreadable at any speed.
The silences carry information too
One unit between the parts of a letter, three between letters, seven between words.
Those gaps are not pauses for breath; they are part of the encoding. Run two letters together with only a one-unit gap and you have sent a different letter entirely: a dot, gap, dash is A, but the same two sounds spaced wider are E followed by T.
Where words per minute comes from
From the word PARIS, which takes exactly fifty units to send.
It was chosen as the benchmark because its mix of dots, dashes and gaps is close to the average of ordinary English. So twenty words per minute means a thousand units a minute, which makes one unit sixty milliseconds. This page uses that standard directly.
Why Farnsworth spacing exists
Because learning slowly teaches the wrong thing.
Sent at five words per minute, a letter is slow enough to count the dots — and counting is a habit that has to be unlearned before any real speed is possible. Farnsworth sends each character at full speed and pads the gaps instead, so the ear learns the shape of a letter from the start.
About the Morse Code Converter
Two linked boxes that translate between text and International Morse in either direction, plus a tone generator that sends what you have written at a speed you choose. It covers the twenty-six letters, the ten digits, eighteen punctuation marks and six prosigns.
Hearing it is the point
Morse was never designed to be looked at.
It was designed for a wire, and later for radio, where the only thing arriving is a tone that is either present or absent. Written dots and dashes are a notation for that sound, in the way sheet music is a notation for a tune — useful, but not the thing itself. Nobody has ever learned to receive Morse by reading it, and every experienced operator hears whole letters and eventually whole words rather than assembling them from parts.
That is why this page synthesises a tone rather than printing symbols and stopping. The lamp flashing alongside gives you the timing visually at the same moment, which is how the relationship between the written form and the sound becomes obvious.
Which characters have a code, and which do not
Latin letters, digits, a short list of marks. Nothing else, and this page does not invent any.
Type an accented letter, a rupee sign or anything in a non-Latin script and the page tells you plainly that no Morse exists for it, listing the characters it had to leave out. Some national variants do exist — there are established codes for accented letters in several European languages, and separate systems entirely for Japanese and Russian — but they are not International Morse, and quietly substituting an unaccented letter would change what you sent.
Prosigns are not abbreviations
They are single symbols that happen to be written as two letters run together.
SOS is the clearest example. It is not S, then O, then S; it is one unbroken nine-element sequence, and the absence of gaps is what makes it unmistakable through interference. It was chosen for exactly that reason, and not as an abbreviation of anything — the phrases attached to it afterwards came later. The other prosigns mark structure: AR ends a message, SK ends a contact, BT separates paragraphs.
Still in use, if less than it was
Maritime Morse ended in 1999; amateur radio never stopped.
The Global Maritime Distress and Safety System replaced it at sea, and licensing requirements dropped the Morse test in most countries during the 2000s. What kept it alive is physics: a Morse signal occupies a tiny slice of bandwidth and can be picked out of noise far below the level where speech becomes unintelligible, so it still gets through when nothing else will. Aviation beacons identify themselves in Morse to this day, and operators use it for long-distance contacts on very little power.
Related pages
Two others in the same family.
For the numeric values behind characters rather than their sound, see the Text and ASCII Converter. For an older written system, the Roman Numeral Converter handles numbers the same way this page handles letters.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SOS in Morse code?
Three dots, three dashes, three dots — sent as one symbol with no gaps.
Written out it is …—… rather than … — …, and that difference is real: run together it is a distress prosign, spaced apart it is merely the letters S, O and S. Press the SOS button on this page to insert the correct unbroken form.
Does SOS stand for Save Our Souls?
No. It was picked because of how it sounds, not what it spells.
The 1906 conference that adopted it wanted a sequence that was rhythmic, unmistakable and impossible to confuse with ordinary traffic. Save Our Souls, Save Our Ship and the rest are backronyms invented afterwards to make it memorable.
How long should I take to learn it?
Most people reach a usable speed in a few months of short daily sessions.
Start at around eighteen words per minute for the characters themselves, with Farnsworth spacing set low so the gaps give you thinking time. Never slow the characters down — learn each one as a rhythm, not as a count of dots — and shorten the gaps as you improve rather than speeding the letters up.
What does a higher WPM setting change?
The length of a single unit, and therefore everything else.
Twenty words per minute puts one unit at sixty milliseconds, so a dot is 60 ms and a dash 180 ms. Double the speed and every duration halves; the ratios never move. Drag the speed slider on this page and press Play to hear the same message at two speeds.
Why does my accented text come out incomplete?
Because International Morse has no code for accented letters.
The page lists exactly which characters it dropped rather than substituting a plain letter, because sending a bare e in place of an accented one changes the message. If you need one of the national variants, look up the code for that specific language.
Can I use this offline, and is anything sent anywhere?
Yes to the first, no to the second.
Everything — translation, the reference chart and the audio — runs in your browser. The tone is synthesised rather than streamed, so no sound file is fetched, no library is loaded from anywhere, and nothing you type leaves your device.