Morse Code Translator

How to use the Morse Code Translator

The tool runs in both directions:

• Text to Morse: type or paste your text in the top box, then click Text to Morse. Letters are separated by a single space; words are separated by / .
• Morse to Text: paste morse code in the bottom box, then click Morse to Text. Use dots . and hyphens -, a space between letters, and / between words.

All 26 letters, digits 0-9, and common punctuation are supported. Characters the tool does not recognise are silently skipped; unrecognised morse sequences return an error message.

International Morse Code reference

The International Morse Code alphabet, standardised by the ITU:

A short history of morse code

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed the code in the 1830s for the electric telegraph. It spread fast: across railroad lines, then under the Atlantic. Skilled operators could copy 25 or more words per minute by ear alone, no display involved. The system carried traffic through both World Wars, and merchant vessels were still required to monitor the distress frequency at 500 kHz until 1999. Today it shows up in amateur radio, aviation navigation beacons, and some assistive-technology input methods. The SOS signal (... --- ...) remains universally recognised, which is a longer shelf life than most 19th-century technology gets.

Which tool on this site you actually want

This translator handles straight text-to-dots-and-dashes conversion, both directions, and that covers most visitors. But "morse code" questions branch fast, and the branch you are on changes which page is useful.

If you have a string of dots and hyphens from a puzzle, a tattoo design, or an old telegram and you want the plain English underneath it, use the Morse to Text box above and paste the code in with single spaces between letters and a forward slash between words. The decoding guide walks through what to do when the tool returns an error instead of a word: usually a missing space or a transcription typo in the source code.

If you are building something the other direction, a message to send by key, a prop for a show, a hidden note, type your text into the top box. Worked letter-by-letter breakdowns, including the classic HELLO example, live on the text-to-Morse page.

If your question is not "convert this" but "how do I get good at this by ear," the translator is the wrong tool entirely. Reading dots off a screen and copying code from a radio are different skills. Start with the learning guide, which covers the Farnsworth method, or the timing page if you want the actual millisecond math behind words-per-minute.

And if you just need the lookup table, letters, digits, or the punctuation marks that trip people up, jump straight to the alphabet reference or the numbers and punctuation page rather than scrolling this one.

What this translator assumes, and where it will trip you up

The tool above is a straight character mapper. It has no concept of timing, no audio, and no context. A few assumptions follow from that, and each one matters if your result looks wrong.

Case is ignored. The converter uppercases everything before mapping, because Morse code itself has no concept of upper or lower case; the ITU standard defines letter shapes, not letter case. So "hello" and "HELLO" produce identical output.

Unrecognised characters are dropped silently on the text-to-morse side rather than flagged. Type an em-dash, a smart quote, or an emoji and the tool will simply skip it and keep going, which means your output can come back shorter than your input with no warning beyond the character count not matching. The numbers and punctuation page lists exactly which marks are covered.

On the decoding side, the tool is strict rather than forgiving. A single wrong space, an extra hyphen, or a missing slash between words returns an outright error rather than a best guess. That is a deliberate choice: guessing at malformed Morse produces confident-looking wrong answers, and this tool would rather tell you something is broken than invent a letter.

Finally, there is no timing model here at all, no dit length, no WPM, no audio tone. If you came here expecting to hear code played back at a certain speed, that is a separate topic covered on the timing page, which walks through the 1-3-7 ratio and the PARIS-based words-per-minute formula in detail.

Where people get tripped up

A handful of mistakes show up over and over in the messages we get about this tool.

The most common is treating dots and dashes as visually interchangeable with a keyboard's hyphen and period. A hyphen typed with a trailing space usually decodes fine, but a curly or em dash pasted from a word processor will not match anything in the lookup table, and the decoder will reject the whole word rather than substitute a guess.

A close second is forgetting that letters need single spaces and words need the slash. Writing ".... ..... .-.. .-.. ---" with no separators at all is not decodable, because the tool cannot know where one letter's dots and dashes end and the next one's begin. Every letter code needs its own space-delimited slot.

People also assume punctuation works the same as letters, and it mostly does, but some marks are longer strings of dots and dashes than any letter (the period is six symbols: .-.-.-), so a small transcription slip in a punctuation mark is more likely to produce an unrecognised sequence than the same slip in a short letter like E or T.

Last, a fair number of visitors are actually trying to learn to copy code by ear and land on a text tool instead. If that is the goal, converting text on a screen will not build the skill. Time spent with the learning guide and actual audio practice gets there faster than staring at dots.