The Full Morse Code Alphabet

This page is a reference table. To convert text automatically instead of reading it manually, the translator on the home page does the lookup in a fraction of a second.

Reading the Table: What the Spacing Means

Each character maps to one sequence of dots and dashes. A dot is a short signal. A dash runs exactly three times as long. Within a character, the pause between elements is one dot long. Between letters in a word, the pause runs three dots long, the same duration as one dash. Between words, it stretches to seven dots.

Timing carries as much meaning as the symbols themselves. Get the spacing wrong and a receiver cannot tell where one letter ends and the next begins.

In written form, dots appear as a period (.) and dashes as a hyphen (-). A single space separates letters, and a forward slash (/) or a longer pause separates words. The word CAT, for instance, reads as -.-. .- -.

Letters A Through Z

A couple of patterns are worth noticing. E is a single dot and T a single dash, the two shortest codes in the whole set, matching the fact that E and T are the most frequent letters in English text. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail reportedly built the original assignments by counting letters in a printer's type case, giving the shortest codes to the most common letters. The logic held up well enough that nobody has needed to redesign it since.

Digits 0 Through 9

Every digit runs five elements long, longer than most letters, which makes numbers slower to send. Each one mixes dashes filling in from one side.

The logic runs cleanly once you see it: 1 opens with one dot then four dashes, 2 with two dots then three dashes, and so on through 5, all dots. From there 6 flips to one dash then four dots, working back to 0, all dashes. It is one of the tidier design choices in the whole system, and once noticed it is hard to unsee.

Common Punctuation

Punctuation codes run longer than letter codes on purpose. Punctuation rarely shows up in real Morse traffic, a station sending a position report or a distress message has little use for a semicolon, so the extra length is a fair trade for characters that come up rarely.

SOS: The One Everyone Recognizes

SOS is ... --- ..., three dots, three dashes, three dots. It became the international distress signal at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference of 1906 and entered wide international use by 1908. The choice was deliberate: the pattern is easy to recognize, hard to confuse with anything else, and simple enough to send under real stress. Officially, SOS transmits as one continuous sequence with no letter spacing, reading as a single signal rather than three letters strung together. The full story, including where the backronym "Save Our Souls" came from, lives on the SOS in Morse code page.

Prosigns and Procedural Signals

Beyond the core alphabet, Morse operators use procedural signals called prosigns, two letters sent with no inter-letter gap so they function as one blended character. Common examples include AR (end of message), SK (end of contact), and BT (a break separating text sections). These show up regularly in real radio logs, though most casual online converters skip them entirely.

International Morse vs. American Morse

The table above uses International Morse Code, sometimes called Continental Morse, standardized by the ITU in 1865 and updated since. An older variant, American Morse Code, ran on US landline telegraph through the 19th century and into the early 20th. It assigns different codes to several letters and includes shorter dashes with internal spaces inside some characters, and it is effectively obsolete today. When anyone says "Morse code" without qualifying it, they mean the international version above.

A Few Words Worked Out

The gaps between code groups mark letter boundaries. MORSE breaks into M (--), O (---), R (.-.), S (...), E (.), five letters and five groups, one space each. A second word would need a slash or a longer pause to separate it from the first.

For anything longer than a handful of words, the translator handles spacing automatically. The step-by-step mechanics of each direction are covered separately on converting text to Morse code and converting Morse code back to text.