Morse code translator
Convert text to Morse code and Morse code back to text, then press play to hear the dots and dashes at proper timing. Uses the International Morse Code (ITU) standard with letters, numbers, and punctuation. Runs entirely in your browser, no signup.
Letters become dot-dash groups; an unsupported character shows as #.
About the Morse translator
The Morse code translator does two jobs from one box: it turns ordinary writing into the dot-and-dash code, and it reads dots and dashes back into letters. It follows International Morse Code, the standard set by the ITU, so the output matches what a ham radio operator, a scout, or an aviation student would recognise anywhere in the world. Letters, the digits 0 through 9, and the common punctuation marks are all covered, and anything outside that set is flagged with a # so you can see exactly where a character could not be encoded.
What sets this apart from a plain lookup table is that you can hear it. Press play and the tool sounds the message out with a sine-wave tone at correct relative timing, so a dash lasts three times as long as a dot and the gaps between letters and words are the proper length. That makes it useful for learning to read Morse by ear, not just on paper, which is the part most beginners struggle with.
How to use it
- Choose a direction with the tabs at the top: 'Text to Morse' to encode, or 'Morse to Text' to decode.
- Type or paste into the left panel. When encoding, write normally; when decoding, separate each letter with a single space and each word with a slash ( / ).
- Read the converted result in the right panel, where it updates as you type.
- Press 'Play sound' to hear the dots and dashes at standard timing, and 'Stop' to cut it off early.
- Use 'Swap' to move the result into the input and flip the direction, which is handy for checking a round trip.
- Click 'Copy' to put the result on your clipboard, or 'Clear' to start over.
Examples
Encode the classic distress signal
Type SOS and the tool returns ... --- ... — three dots, three dashes, three dots. It is famous precisely because it is unmistakable by ear, and pressing play makes that obvious: the short-short-short, long-long-long, short-short-short rhythm is impossible to confuse with anything else even through static.
Decode a spaced-out message
Paste .... . .-.. .-.. --- into the decode side with single spaces between letters, and you get HELLO. Add a slash to mark a new word, so .... . .-.. .-.. --- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. becomes HELLO WORLD. The slash is what tells the decoder where one word ends and the next begins.
Spell out a name with numbers
Encoding 'Unit 7' produces ..- -. .. - / --... — the letters of UNIT, a word break, then the five-element code for 7. Numbers always use five dots and dashes in Morse, which is why digits sound longer and more regular than most letters when you play them back.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between American and International Morse?
- International Morse Code (the ITU standard this tool uses) is the version used worldwide for radio, aviation, and amateur use. The older American Morse, used on 19th-century telegraph lines, had different codes and internal spacing for some letters and is now effectively obsolete. If you see a single modern Morse chart, it is almost always International.
- How should I space letters and words when decoding?
- Put one space between the dot-dash groups for each letter, and a forward slash with spaces around it ( / ) between words. Without the gaps the decoder cannot tell where one letter stops and the next starts, because Morse has no fixed length per character.
- Why do I see a # in the output?
- A # marks a character that has no International Morse equivalent, such as an emoji or an unsupported symbol. Standard Morse only defines codes for the 26 letters, the ten digits, and a short list of punctuation, so anything else cannot be represented.
- How fast does the audio play?
- The tone uses standard relative timing: a dash is three times the length of a dot, the gap inside a character is one dot length, the gap between characters is three, and the gap between words is seven. The base unit is set for comfortable beginner listening rather than contest speed.
- Is Morse code still used today?
- Yes, though rarely for everyday messaging. Amateur radio operators still use it because it carries further than voice on weak signals, aviation uses it to identify navigation beacons, and it remains a fallback for emergency signalling by light or sound when no other channel works.
Good to know
Morse code dates to the 1830s and the telegraph, when Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail needed a way to send letters down a single electrical wire as patterns of short and long pulses. The clever part is the design: the most common English letters got the shortest codes, so E is a single dot and T a single dash, while rare letters like Q and Y are longer. That frequency-based shortening is the same idea behind modern data compression, more than a century early.
If you are learning, train your ear rather than your eyes. Reading a chart teaches you to translate symbol by symbol, but real Morse is recognised as sound shapes, the rhythm of a whole letter at once. Use the play button to hear short words repeatedly until the pattern, not the individual beeps, is what you notice. Start with high-frequency letters and short words, keep the speed steady, and resist slowing the gaps, since learning at near-target spacing avoids a plateau later. The tool never sends anything to a server, so practise as much as you like privately.