About the Morse Code Translator
International Morse code represents each letter and digit as a pattern of dots and dashes. This translator converts text to Morse, separating the code for each letter with a space and each word with a slash, which is the standard written convention. Letters, digits and common punctuation are supported; characters with no Morse equivalent are shown as a question mark so nothing is silently dropped.
The code is variable length by design: E is a single dot and T a single dash because they are the most frequent letters in English, while Q needs four symbols. What written Morse cannot carry is the timing that makes it work on the air, where a dash lasts three dot-lengths, the gap between letters is three and the gap between words is seven. The space and the slash in this output stand in for those two gaps.
Morse is case-insensitive, so the output is the same whatever case you type. Prosigns are the exception to the letter-by-letter rule: a real distress call is sent as one unbroken symbol, whereas SOS typed here comes out as ... --- ... with gaps between the letters, which is what puzzles and text contexts expect. Its practical uses today are amateur radio, accessibility signalling and puzzles. The Morse to Text tool reverses it, and Text to Binary is the other classic way to write a message in two symbols.
How to use
- Type text on the left.
- Copy the Morse from the right.
- Swap decodes Morse back to text.
Common questions
- How are words separated?
- By a slash (/). Letters within a word are separated by a single space.
- What happens to characters with no Morse code?
- They are shown as a question mark, so you can see where they were.
- Is it case-sensitive?
- No. Morse has no case, so upper and lower case produce the same code.