Text to Morse Code Converter

Intro

This free bidirectional converter turns plain text into International Morse Code and decodes Morse back into letters, digits, and common punctuation. The output uses the standard · for a dot and − for a dash, with a single space between letters and a forward slash between words, following the convention shared by amateur radio operators, military signallers, and aviation beacon identifications worldwide.

Morse code is a binary channel that humans and machines can both read: each symbol is either short (dit, dot) or long (dah, dash), and the listener recovers letters by counting timing rather than by analysing pitch. That property is why it survived the transition from spark-gap telegraph to continuous-wave (CW) radio, why it remains the standard identifier for non-directional beacons (NDBs) at airports, and why it is still taught as a backup skill in marine and amateur-radio licensing courses.

The converter uses the International Morse Code (sometimes abbreviated ITC) defined by ITU-R Recommendation M.1677-1, which the International Telecommunication Union published in 2009 and which is the version taught in every national amateur-radio syllabus since. American Morse (also called Railroad Morse), the older variant used on North American telegraph wires from the 1840s through the 1960s, uses different patterns for a handful of letters and is intentionally not supported here.

How to Use

1. Pick a direction with the toggle at the top: Text → Morse to encode, or Morse → Text to decode.
2. Type or paste into the top box. Encoding accepts plain text in any case; decoding accepts the standard ·/− form with single spaces between letters and slashes between words.
3. Read the live result in the box below, it updates as you type, no submit button required.
4. Use Copy morse or Copy text to grab the result to your clipboard.
5. In encode mode, press Play sound to hear the encoded message as a 600 Hz continuous-wave tone with the standard 100 ms dot / 300 ms dash timing.
6. Click any of the quick-test chips (SOS, HELLO, A, 1984, I LOVE MORSE) to load a hand-verified example.

The Timing Rules

The encoder prints symbols; the optional playback adds silence and tone so the message sounds right on a CW receiver. Both obey the same timing convention, which is the single most important thing to learn about Morse code.

• One unit is the duration of a single dot.
• A dash lasts exactly three units.
• The gap between two elements of the same letter (the gap between one symbol and the next inside a single letter) is exactly one unit.
• The gap between two letters is three units of silence.
• The gap between two words is seven units of silence.

In the printed representation, the converter compresses those gaps to readable punctuation: a single space between letters (three units), and a forward slash between words (seven units). On the wire or on the air the listener decodes by relative silence length, not by counting characters.

The playback defaults are dot = 100 ms, dash = 300 ms, intra-character gap = 100 ms, letter gap = 300 ms, word gap = 700 ms. That gives an overall sending speed of about 10 words per minute, slow enough to be easy to copy by ear and fast enough that a short message plays in a few seconds. Skilled operators send at 20 to 30 WPM; the converter does not change the unit length per message, but you can mentally scale the times to match a faster speed.

The International Morse Code Table

The character set below is the complete ITC table for letters, digits, and the most common punctuation. Each entry shows the dot/dash sequence that the encoder outputs and the decoder accepts.

Letters

Digits

Common Punctuation

Worked Examples

Example 1: SOS

The letters S, O, and S in Morse are ···, −−−, and ··· respectively. Joined with single spaces, SOS becomes ... --- .... This is the canonical international distress signal and is the first message every new CW operator learns. The encoding is unambiguous because no other common pattern shares the same five-symbol sequence, which is why it survives as the radio distress call even though voice radio has long since replaced Morse on most ships.

Example 2: HELLO

H = ····, E = ·, L = ·−··, L = ·−··, O = −−−. With one space between each letter, HELLO becomes .... . .-.. .-.. ---. The double dot at the start is what distinguishes H from S; the listener's job is to count carefully and let the timing gaps tell you where one letter ends and the next begins.

Example 3: A

The letter A is .-, a single dot followed by a single dash. It is the shortest letter pair (alongside N −· and I ··) and is often used to verify that a transmitter and receiver are connected end-to-end before sending a longer message.

Example 4: 1984

Digits are five symbols each, so they take longer to send than letters but are easy to copy because every digit begins with a known number of dots. 1 = ·−−−−, 9 = −−−−·, 8 = −−−··, 4 = ····−. 1984 becomes .---- ----. ---.. ....-.

Example 5: I LOVE MORSE

I = ··, L = ·−··, O = −−−, V = ···−, E = ·, M = −−, O = −−−, R = ·−·, S = ···, E = ·. With spaces between letters and slashes between words, I LOVE MORSE becomes .. .-.. --- ...- . -- --- .-. ... .. The double-spacing in the printed output reflects the seven-unit gap between words: the converter renders it as /, but because most encoders strip the outer spaces the visible result often shows two spaces flanking the slash.

Where It Shows Up

• Amateur (ham) radio. CW is the original amateur-radio mode and is still widely used on the HF bands because a CW signal occupies only a few hundred hertz of bandwidth and can be copied through interference that would render voice unreadable. New amateur operators in many countries are still required to pass a short Morse-reception test for HF privileges.
• Aviation beacon identification. Non-directional beacons (NDBs) and certain VOR/DME stations identify themselves with a one-to-three-letter Morse callsign broadcast every few seconds. Pilots use the identifier to confirm they are tuned to the right station before flying an instrument approach.
• Marine distress and safety. SOS (... --- ...) and the modern Mayday/Pan-Pan voice calls both trace their urgency to Morse. Many commercial ships still carry a radio direction finder that can home in on a 500 kHz CW signal, and lifeboat equipment often includes a flashing-light Morse key.
• Medical telemetry and assistive technology. Some implanted medical devices and life-critical pagers still transmit in Morse-compatible on-off-keyed formats because the receiver only needs an envelope detector. People with certain types of hearing loss or speech impairment use two-tone Morse as an accessible alternative to text or voice.
• Search-and-rescue and wilderness signalling. Aircraft survival kits, marine pyrotechnics, and ground-to-air signalling mirrors all teach the SOS pattern. Flashlight tapping on a wall, horn blasts from a boat, and semaphore-style arm-wave flashing are all forms of on-off keying that follow the same Morse timing rules.
• Emergency preparedness and amateur history. Scouts, preppers, and history enthusiasts learn Morse because it needs no internet, no cellular signal, and no grid power, just a battery, a wire, and a key. Museums and historic radio clubs transmit scheduled Morse bulletins on special event stations.
• Software and education. Morse is a fun first project for student programmers because the encoding table is small, the algorithm is a one-line dictionary lookup, and the result is immediately audible. Many beginner Arduino and Raspberry Pi tutorials use a Morse blinker as the "hello world" of physical computing.

Common Mistakes

• Mixing International Morse with American Morse. American Morse (also called Railroad Morse) uses different patterns for letters like C, O, R, L, and the digits 0 to 9. Sending "OK" in American Morse is different from sending it in ITC, and an ITC receiver will not decode American Morse reliably. If you are learning from a general-audience tutorial, confirm which variant it teaches before practising.
• Ignoring the timing rules. A common beginner error is to leave equal gaps between every symbol, regardless of whether the symbols belong to the same letter or to adjacent letters. A perfectly-spaced "... --- ..." is harder to copy than the same symbols sent with one-unit gaps inside each letter and three-unit gaps between them. The encoder renders the gaps for you; if you learn Morse by ear, focus on the relative silence lengths.
• Pasting Unicode-looking characters that look like dots and dashes but are not. The middle dot · (U+00B7), the bullet • (U+2022), the en-dash - (U+2013), and the em-dash, (U+2014) are visually similar to the ASCII period and hyphen but the decoder will treat them as unknown symbols. The decoder accepts the middle-dot · as an alias for a dot and en/em-dashes as aliases for a dash, but it is far safer to paste plain ASCII ".-" sequences when sharing messages with other operators.
• Forgetting the slash between words. The encoder writes a forward slash between words. If you remove the slash when copying the output for transmission, the receiver cannot tell where one word ends and the next begins, especially in a long message where the seven-unit gap is hard to hear against background noise.
• Confusing a single digit zero with the letter O. The digit 0 is five dashes (−−−−−) and the letter O is three dashes (−−−). They sound similar at low speed; context is the only reliable disambiguator.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between International Morse Code and American Morse?

American Morse (also called Railroad Morse) was the original variant Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed in the 1840s, and it remained in use on North American telegraph wires until the 1960s. It uses a different set of symbols for several common letters, for example, C in American Morse is ·−·· rather than the International −·−·, and digits use a shorter four-element form. International Morse Code was standardised in 1865 in Paris and updated several times since, with the current ITU-R M.1677-1 recommendation published in 2009. Modern amateur radio, aviation, and marine use only the International variant; American Morse survives mainly in historical reenactment.

Why is the letter E just a single dot?

The original Morse code, designed for telegraph wires rather than radio, weighted letters so that the most common English letters had the shortest codes, a kind of Huffman-style compression built into the alphabet. E, T, A, O, and I are the most frequent letters in English, and all five have one- or two-element codes. This is why early operators could send several words per minute with very little effort, and why Morse has always been associated with great efficiency.

What is the standard speed of Morse code?

Professional telegraphers historically worked at 25 to 35 words per minute (WPM), with some skilled press operators exceeding 50 WPM. Amateur-radio contests routinely include CW at 30 to 40 WPM. The PARIS standard, defined by the international amateur-radio union, defines one word as the 50-element sequence "PARIS ", so a station sending at 25 WPM is producing about 25 dot-lengths per letter on average across that benchmark word. The encoder in this tool defaults to about 10 WPM so the playback is easy to listen to; you can speed it up by reducing the dot duration.

Can I use this for the amateur-radio licence exam?

In most countries the CW requirement has been removed or reduced to a small number of low-speed characters, but a few administrations (and some legacy licences) still require five or ten words per minute of Morse reception. The converter is a great study aid for memorising the A-Z table and the digit patterns; for actual licence practice you should listen to recordings at the regulated speed (typically 5 WPM in the slower band) and write down what you hear without any prompting.

Does the decoder handle punctuation?

Yes. The ITC table includes a small set of common punctuation marks, period, comma, question mark, apostrophe, exclamation, slash, parentheses, ampersand, colon, semicolon, equals, plus, hyphen, underscore, quote, dollar sign, and at sign. If you paste a punctuation character that the table does not define (for example, a backtick or a caret), the decoder substitutes a question mark so the output length still matches the input length and you can spot where the unsupported symbol fell.

Is the Web Audio playback safe for headphones?

Yes. The tone is a pure 600 Hz sine wave at a low volume (~0.25 gain on the Web Audio gain node). That is quieter than typical music and well below the level that would damage hearing. If you want to play the message on a speaker instead of headphones, just unplug and press Play, the audio context will route to your default output automatically. Some browsers require a user gesture before audio plays, which is why the Play button is required: clicking it counts as the gesture.

What is the timing of SOS exactly?

SOS in International Morse is three dots, three dashes, three dots, with one-unit gaps between symbols inside the S's and the O, three-unit gaps between the three letters, and no word gaps because SOS is a single word. In printed form that is ... --- .... In CW transmission the same message lasts 3·(1) + 3·(3) + 3·(1) dot units of tone plus the silence, which works out to a fraction of a second at 25 WPM and about two seconds at 10 WPM.

References

• International Telecommunication Union, Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1, International Morse Code, Geneva, 2009. The authoritative current definition of the code table and timing.
• American Radio Relay League (ARRL), The ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications, annual editions. The standard reference for amateur-radio operators and the source of the A-Z and 0 to 9 tables reproduced above.
• Wikipedia contributors, Morse code and American Morse code articles. Useful for cross-checking the difference between ITC and the older Railroad Morse, and for the etymology of "dit" and "dah".
• IARU Region 1, IARU Region 1 HF Band Plan and CW operating procedure documents. Source of the standard 5 WPM and 10 WPM training speeds referenced above.
• US Federal Aviation Administration, Aeronautical Information Manual (AIM), Chapter 1. Navigation Aids, for the standard use of two- and three-letter Morse identifiers on non-directional beacons and VOR stations.