The Full Morse Code Alphabet

Morse code is a method of encoding text as a sequence of short signals (dots) and long signals (dashes). Each letter, digit, and punctuation mark gets its own unique pattern. Send a dot, a dash, a pause. Repeat until the message is done. That is the whole idea. The modern version is standardized by the International Telecommunication Union in ITU-R M.1677-1, which is the version used by amateur radio operators, maritime services, and everyone else who still sends Morse today.

This page is a reference. If you want to convert text automatically, the morse code translator on the home page will do it in a second. But if you want to understand the code itself, read on.

How to read a Morse code table

Each character maps to a sequence of dots and dashes. A dot is a short signal. A dash is exactly three times as long as a dot. Between elements within a character, the pause is one dot long. Between letters in a word, the pause is three dots long (the same as one dash). Between words, the pause is seven dots long.

The timing matters as much as the symbols themselves. Get the spacing wrong and a receiver cannot tell where one letter ends and the next begins.

In written Morse, dots are shown as a period (.) and dashes as a hyphen (-). A single space separates letters. A forward slash (/) or a longer gap separates words. So the word CAT would look like this: -.-. .- -.

Letters A through Z

A few patterns worth noting. E is a single dot, T is a single dash. They are the two shortest codes, which reflects the fact that E and T are the most common letters in English. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail designed the original code by counting the letters in a printer's type case, and the most common letters got the shortest codes. It worked then; it still works now.

Digits 0 through 9

Digits are all five elements long, which makes them slower to send than most letters. Each is a mix of dashes filling in from one side.

Notice the pattern: 1 is one dot followed by four dashes, 2 is two dots then three dashes, and so on through 5 (all dots). Then 6 is one dash then four dots, working back to 0 (all dashes). Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It is one of the more elegant design choices in the whole system.

Common punctuation

Punctuation codes are longer than letter codes, which is intentional. In most Morse transmissions, punctuation is rare. A station sending a position report or a distress message does not need semicolons. The longer codes are a fair trade for characters that come up infrequently.

SOS: the most recognized Morse sequence

SOS is ... --- .... Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It was adopted as the international distress signal at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference of 1906, and came into international use in 1908. The choice was deliberate: the pattern is easy to recognize, hard to confuse with anything else, and simple enough to tap out under stress. Officially, SOS is sent as one continuous sequence without the usual letter spacing, so it reads as a single signal rather than three separate letters.

The backronym "Save Our Souls" came later. The original choice was purely practical.

Prosigns and procedural signals

Beyond the main alphabet, Morse operators use a set of procedural signals called prosigns. These are two letters sent without the inter-letter gap, so they function as one character. Common examples include AR (end of message), SK (end of contact), and BT (break, separating text sections). You will see these if you read actual radio logs, though they do not appear in most casual Morse converters.

International versus American Morse

The table on this page uses International Morse Code, also called Continental Morse, which the ITU standardized in 1865 and has updated since. There is also American Morse Code, an earlier variant used on landline telegraph in the United States through the 19th and early 20th centuries. American Morse has different codes for several letters and includes shorter dashes and internal spaces within some characters. It is essentially obsolete. When anyone says "Morse code" without a qualifier, they mean the ITU international version.

Worked examples

A few short words to put the tables above to use:

The spaces between code groups represent letters. MORSE breaks down as M (--), O (---), R (.-.), S (...), E (.). Five letters, five groups, one space between each. If there were a second word, a slash or a longer gap would separate them.

For anything longer than a few words, the morse code translator handles the encoding automatically, including proper spacing. If you want to understand the encoding or decoding process in more depth, the articles on converting text to Morse code and converting Morse code back to text walk through both directions step by step.