Morse Code Translator (Text ↔ Morse)

What this tool does

Morse code writes text as short and long tones — dots and dashes — so a message can cross a noisy channel, a flashing lamp or a single radio frequency without needing a shared alphabet beyond the code itself. This page converts in both directions: type ordinary text and get the dot-dash pattern, or paste a pattern and get the text back. Letters are separated by a space, words by a slash. It is useful for radio operators, teachers running a signalling exercise, puzzle setters, and anyone who needs to decode a message found in a game or a film.

The conversion is a lookup, not an approximation: every character either has an entry in the standard table or it does not. Characters that are not in the table — accented letters, emoji, Chinese characters — are reported rather than silently dropped or guessed at, so you can see exactly why a result looks shorter than your input.

Method

The tool uses the International Morse code table defined by the ITU in recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1. Encoding uppercases the input, looks up each character, joins the letters of a word with a single space and joins words with / . Decoding reverses the table, splitting on the slash to recover word boundaries; a pattern with no entry comes back as ? so an error is visible rather than hidden.

Character	Morse	Note
S	...	three dots
O	---	three dashes
E	.	the shortest code
T	-	the shortest dash code
1	.----	digits run from five dots to five dashes
?	..--..	punctuation is also in the standard table

Example

Text	Morse
SOS	... --- ...
HELLO	.... . .-.. .-.. ---
HELLO WORLD	.... . .-.. .-.. --- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -..
123	.---- ..--- ...--

Spaces in Morse are not what you hear

A written Morse message uses one space between letters and a slash between words, but that is a convention for typing, not the thing being transmitted. On air, the spacing is timing, measured in units against the length of a dot:

Gap	Length	Example
Dot	1 unit	E is one unit of tone
Dash	3 units	T is three units of tone
Within a character	1 unit of silence	the gap inside C (−·−·)
Between letters	3 units of silence	the gap in SOS
Between words	7 units of silence	the gap in HELLO WORLD

This is why the same message sounds different at different speeds even though the pattern is the same, and why a decoder that learns from audio must estimate the unit length before it can decide whether a gap is a letter break or a word break. A text tool has the easier job: the sender has already made that decision and written it as spaces.

What has no Morse entry

The ITU table covers the 26 Latin letters, the ten digits and a set of punctuation marks. It has no entries for accented letters, Cyrillic, Greek, CJK, emoji or most other symbols, and this tool does not invent them: an unmappable character is left out and counted, with the count shown under the result. That is the honest behaviour — a numeral in place of a letter (the convention some operators use for accented characters in informal traffic) would look like data rather than a substitution.

A practical consequence is that non-English text usually encodes partially. Tiếng Việt becomes TING VIT, because the accented letters are dropped rather than transliterated. If the message needs to survive intact, transliterate first — the diacritics tools here can strip accents — and expect the receiving operator to reconstruct the spelling from context.

Decoding is a table lookup, so errors show

Morse has no checksum and no redundancy: every pattern is legal input, and a pattern with no entry is the only kind of error the format can report. A transmitted error does not appear as an error at all — one wrong dot turns E into I, and the receiver reads a different word. This tool therefore reports only what it can know: the number of tokens that did not match any character. It counts those before decoding rather than looking for a placeholder character afterward, because a question mark is itself a valid code (..--..) and a message ending in one would otherwise be reported as broken.

Decoding preserves the word boundaries the input supplies, whether as a slash or as a run of two or more spaces, and joins the letters of each word without spaces. Lowercase input is uppercased before encoding, because Morse has no case — the code is the same for a and A.

Where Morse is still used

Amateur radio operators still use it, in contests and on the low-power bands where a narrow signal and a human ear outperform any modem. Aviation and maritime services have retired it, but the distress sequence ... --- ... remains universally recognised as a distress signal — and that recognition is the reason it appears in games, films and puzzles. Outside radio it is a teaching device: it is the smallest complete encoding most people ever learn, which makes it a useful first example of how a code maps symbols to meanings.

Frequently asked questions

Go deeper

Longer explanations of the problems this tool solves:

Morse, Braille and NATO: three ways to spell a message

Sources

• ITU-R M.1677-1, International Morse code (International Telecommunication Union).
• Unicode Standard — used only to count characters; the Morse table itself is not a Unicode property.