Morse code translator

Dots and dashes

Morse code writes each letter as a short sequence of dots (·) and dashes (−): E is a single dot, T a single dash, S three dots, O three dashes. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail designed it in the 1830s for the electric telegraph, giving the most common English letters the shortest codes. The modern International Morse code is maintained by the ITU and is still used by amateur radio operators, pilots identifying navigation beacons, and anyone who needs a signal that works with a flashlight, a whistle or a tap on a pipe.

This translator writes letters separated by spaces and words separated by a slash, the usual written convention.

Worked example

SOS is ... --- ...: three dots, three dashes, three dots. It was chosen as the distress signal in 1906 because it is easy to send and recognise, not because it stands for any words. Hello World becomes .... . .-.. .-.. --- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -...

Timing

When sent, a dash lasts three times as long as a dot, letters are separated by a gap of three dots and words by seven.

The page detects whether you typed Morse (only dots, dashes, spaces and slashes) or text, unless you pick a direction. For text, it uppercases the input, removes accents (Morse has codes for very few accented letters) and looks up each character in the ITU-R M.1677-1 table, skipping characters that have no code and listing them. For Morse, it splits words at slashes or long gaps and letters at spaces, accepting · and − as dot and dash, and marks unknown sequences with �. Everything runs in your browser.