Morse code translator
Translates both ways, sends it as tone, flash or vibration, and measures your own keying against the 1:3 the standard asks for.
Practise your keying
One tap on the left is exactly one dot and one on the right exactly one dash, however long you hold it. Length stops mattering; only the side does. Keys J and K.
- Presses
- 0
- Gap inside a letter (the standard is one dot)
- not measured
In this mode the page generates the lengths at 20 wpm, so they are not a measurement of your hand. What is yours is the gaps you leave between letters, and what you end up spelling.
Decode by ear
Point the microphone at the speaker sending the Morse and press listen. It needs a clean, steady tone.
Only a narrow band around that frequency is listened to, so room noise stays outside it. On auto it finds the tone itself as soon as it hears a clear one.
Reference chart
Tap any character and it sounds. Press play and it works the other way round: one sounds and you find it.
The ITU never standardised these; they are used by convention on Spanish-language circuits.
Send a few dits before the message. The detector has to hear a tone before it knows how loud one is, so under real background noise the first character comes out wrong and everything after it right — which is why operators send VVV to open. With the filter on it keeps reading through mains hum and fan noise heavy enough to leave the unfiltered detector with nothing at all, and it needs about -35 dB on the meter beside the button. Two signals at once or a badly uneven fist beat it either way.
Generated right here, in your browser. What you type never leaves your device.
Morse code is not an alphabet you look up. It is a rhythm you hear. That distinction is the whole reason most people who try to learn it give up: they memorise a chart, discover they can send at four words a minute and copy nothing at all, and conclude they have no ear for it. What actually happened is that they learned the wrong thing.
This translator does the ordinary job in both directions — type text, get Morse; paste Morse, get text — and it does it as you type, so you never press a button to see the result. But it also sends the message the three ways Morse is really carried: as a tone, as a light, and as vibration. A message you can only read on screen teaches you nothing about the code.
The part no other translator does is the last panel: it listens to you keying. Hold the mouse button, your finger or the space bar, and it measures how long your dots and dashes actually are, what ratio you are holding them at, and what your timing genuinely spelled — which, at the beginning, is rarely what you meant.
How to use it
- 1
Type on the left
Text becomes Morse as you go. Paste Morse instead and it flips direction on its own — the bullets, middots and en-dashes that come off other websites are all understood, so you do not have to clean the input first.
- 2
Press play and listen before you read
The output on screen is the least useful form of the code. Close your eyes for **SOS** and you will hear three short, three long, three short as one shape. That shape is the thing worth learning.
- 3
Set the speed to something honest
Twenty words a minute is where real traffic lives, and the one speed control sets it for everything here — the message, a letter tapped in the chart, and the line the keying panel calls a dash. Pitch and volume sit beside it.
- 4
Turn on the light, and the vibration if your device has it
The lamp flashes with every element. On a phone the vibration motor gives you the message through your hand, which is how Morse is passed silently and how a deaf operator reads it.
- 5
Key it yourself in the practice panel
Pick your instrument first. **Paddles** is the easy one: J is a dot, K is a dash, and how long you hold makes no difference. **Electronic keyer** repeats while you hold and alternates when you squeeze both, which is how most people send today. **Straight key** is the hard one — one contact, and you time the elements yourself against a threshold printed in milliseconds.
- 6
Tap the chart, then play a round against it
Every character in the reference chart is a button: tap it and it sends. Press **Play** above the chart and it works the other way round — one sounds and you find it. Right turns the cell your accent colour, wrong turns it red and shows which one it really was.
- 7
Read what you actually sent
Underneath the figures is the message your timing spelled. If you meant **SOS** and it says **EEETTTEEE**, your dots and dashes are not far enough apart in length — which is the single most common beginner fault and is fixable in about ten minutes.
Things worth keeping in mind
Prosigns: the punctuation that is not punctuation
A prosign is two letters sent run-together, with no gap between them, so the result is a symbol in its own right rather than two letters. They are how operators say things about the conversation itself, and they are why a raw decode of real traffic contains sequences that look like nonsense.
- SOS (...---...) — distress. Nothing else may be sent while it is on the air.
- AR (.-.-.) — end of message. The full stop of a transmission.
- AS (.-...) — wait. Stand by, do not send.
- SK (...-.-) — end of contact. The conversation is over, not just this message.
- BT (-...-) — a break between paragraphs, used as a separator inside a long message.
- KN (-.--.) — go ahead, but only the station I am talking to.
Why old American telegrams will not decode
If you have found a genuine nineteenth-century American telegraph message and it comes out as gibberish here, the message is probably fine and the chart is the wrong one. American Morse — sometimes called Railroad Morse — was a different code, and it stayed in use on American land lines for decades after Europe had moved on.
It differed in two ways that matter. Several letters had entirely different symbols, and some characters contained an internal space, so that C was dot, space, dot-dot: a gap in the middle of a single letter. That worked on a sounder, where an operator listened to a physical clicker and could hear the difference, and failed badly on radio and long cables where timing smeared. International Morse has no internal spaces at all, which is precisely why it survived.
From a wire in 1844 to a beacon you can still hear today
Samuel Morse had the idea and the money; Alfred Vail did much of the work on the code itself, reportedly by walking into a printer's shop and counting how many pieces of each letter were in the type cases. The commonest letter in English got the shortest symbol — E is a single dot — and the rarest got the longest. That is why Morse is fast to send in English and noticeably clumsier in languages with a different letter distribution. The first public message went from Washington to Baltimore on 24 May 1844: "What hath God wrought".
The code you use today is not the one Morse and Vail built. American Morse had internal spaces inside some characters and different symbols for several letters, and it turned out to be miserable over long undersea cables and in radio noise. A German version by Friedrich Gerke, cleaned up in 1848, dropped the internal spaces and regularised the lengths; it was adopted across Europe and eventually became International Morse, standardised by the ITU. This is why a telegram in an old American film does not decode with a modern chart.
**SOS** was not chosen because it stands for anything. Save Our Souls and Save Our Ship are both later inventions. It was picked in 1905 by German regulation, and internationally at Berlin in 1906 with effect from 1908, because as one run-together sequence — three short, three long, three short, no letter gaps — it is impossible to mistake for anything else and impossible to garble into something meaningful. Marconi's stations had been using CQD, and the Titanic in 1912 sent both.
Maritime Morse ended by decree rather than by falling out of use. The GMDSS satellite system replaced it, and the French service signed off on 31 January 1997 with a line that has been quoted ever since: "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." Global cessation followed on 1 February 1999. But the code did not die. Amateur radio still runs on it, because a Morse signal gets through when nothing else will: it occupies a sliver of bandwidth and a human ear can dig it out of noise that would defeat a voice. Aviation and marine navigation beacons still identify themselves in Morse to this day, and if you tune a VOR station you will hear its three letters repeating.
- 1844
- First public message, Washington to Baltimore
- 1908
- SOS in force internationally
- 1999
- Maritime Morse formally ended
- 75.2
- Words per minute, the 1939 copying record
Morse is a rhythm measured in one unit
Everything in Morse is built from one duration, called the dot or the dit. Every other length is a multiple of it, and there are only five lengths in the entire code. A dot is one unit. A dash is three. The gap between two elements inside a letter is one. The gap between letters is three. The gap between words is seven. That is the complete specification, and nothing else about the code matters as much.
This is why speed is quoted in words per minute rather than characters per second: you need a reference word, and the reference word is **PARIS**. Sent with its trailing word gap, PARIS is exactly fifty units long. So at twenty words a minute you are sending a thousand units a minute, and one unit is 1200/20 = 60 milliseconds. Every speed on this page comes from that one division; nothing here is approximated.
The 1:3 ratio is the part hands get wrong. A beginner sending by ear produces dashes about twice a dot rather than three times, because two feels like plenty when you are the one holding the key. To a listener those dashes sit uncomfortably between a dot and a dash, and the message stops being readable well before it stops being sendable. That is exactly what the practice panel measures, and why it prints the ratio next to the number 3 rather than giving you a score.
There is a second half to the problem, and this page deliberately does not solve it. If you learn at five words a minute you learn to count — "dash, dot, dash, dot, that is a C" — and counting has a hard ceiling around ten words a minute that then takes months to unlearn. The fix is the **Farnsworth method**: keep the characters at full speed so each arrives as one recognisable shape, and buy the time back by stretching only the gaps between them. Doing that properly needs two speeds, a character set that grows as you get them right, and a record of which ones you keep missing. That is a course, not a control, and a dedicated Morse trainer is the tool for it. What this page gives you is the shape at whatever speed you ask for, and a chart you can play a round against.
Decoding by ear works the other way round. The microphone panel watches the energy in the band where a Morse tone lives, between about 200 and 1800 Hz, and records how long the tone is present and how long it is absent. Those durations are the same list of numbers the play button produced, only measured instead of generated. It then estimates your dot length from the durations themselves — the widest gap in the sorted lengths is where dots stop and dashes begin — and reads the message back. It never assumes a speed, which is why it can follow a sender it has never heard.
Sending Morse with nothing but a torch
The code was designed to work with whatever you have. A phone torch and a steady hand is a complete signalling system, and practising it away from a screen is what makes it stick.
- 1
Say "dit" at a comfortable pace and time it. Around half a second is right to begin with, which is roughly two and a half words a minute — slow, but you are learning the shape, not the speed.
- 2
A dash is "dit-dit-dit" long. Count all three in your head while the light is on. Feeling it is what produces the two-to-one dash that nobody can read.
- 3
Inside a letter, the gap is exactly as long as a dot. Most people leave far too little and their letters run into one shapeless blur.
- 4
These two gaps carry as much information as the flashes do. A receiver who cannot tell your letter gap from your word gap gets every word run together and has to guess where to cut.
- 5
Three short, three long, three short, with no letter gaps at all — it is sent as one run-together character, which is why it is unmistakable and why it was chosen.
- 6
You will discover your dashes are short and your word gaps are missing. Everybody does. Knowing which of the two is wrong is the entire value of the exercise.
If something is not working
Symptom:The microphone panel decodes gibberish, or nothing at all
- Likely cause:
- It needs a clean, steady tone with silence around it. Background noise, music, two signals at once, or a sender whose dots and dashes are nearly the same length all break the detector, because it cannot tell where one element stops.
- What to do:
- Move closer to the speaker, turn the volume up, and quieten the room. If the sender is a person rather than this page, the problem is usually their timing rather than your microphone — have them play something from this page first to confirm the panel works.
Symptom:There is no sound when I press play
- Likely cause:
- Browsers refuse to start audio until you have interacted with the page, and some devices route output somewhere you are not listening to.
- What to do:
- Click anywhere on the page and press play again. Then check the system volume and which output device is selected — Bluetooth headphones that connected quietly in the background are the usual culprit.
Symptom:The vibrate option is greyed out
- Likely cause:
- Vibration is not available in every browser. Safari on iPhone and iPad has never supported it, so no page can vibrate an iOS device, this one included.
- What to do:
- Use the light instead, which works everywhere. On Android, Chrome and Firefox both vibrate normally — if it is greyed out there, check that your phone is not in silent or do-not-disturb mode.
Symptom:My keying reads as a string of E and T
- Likely cause:
- E is one dot and T is one dash, so a message of nothing but E and T means every element was read as a separate letter. Your gaps inside characters are as long as your gaps between them.
- What to do:
- Keep the key down and up in a tighter rhythm within each letter, then pause deliberately between letters. Aim for a gap inside a letter equal to one dot, and three dots between letters — both figures are printed in the panel while you practise.
Symptom:On the straight key everything comes out as a dash — or everything as a dot
- Likely cause:
- Only the straight key cares how long you hold, and the line between the two comes from the speed. At 20 wpm a dash starts at 120 ms and an ordinary mouse click lasts 80 to 150, so almost everything lands on the dash side. At 40 wpm the line is 60 ms and you get the opposite problem.
- What to do:
- Either bring the speed down until the printed threshold is something your hand can straddle — 10 wpm puts it at 240 ms — or switch to **Paddles**, where J is always a dot and K is always a dash and the length stops mattering. While the key is down the panel shows how long you have held it and which of the two it will be.
Symptom:The microphone panel picks up room noise and invents letters
- Likely cause:
- Without the band-pass, anything loud enough anywhere in the audio range reads as key-down — a chair, a cough, a fan.
- What to do:
- Leave **Filtered** on and watch the level printed beside the button — it wants about **-35 dB** to read at all. Measured against mains hum and fan noise, the filtered detector kept decoding at a hum level that left the unfiltered one with nothing whatsoever, because a band-pass throws away everything that is not near the tone and almost all room noise is well below it. On **Auto** it finds the pitch itself; if it locks onto the wrong thing, type the frequency in and it stays.
Symptom:The ratio never gets near 3
- Likely cause:
- Almost always short dashes. A dash feels long to the sender well before it is long enough for the receiver.
- What to do:
- Count "one-two-three" through every dash. If the ratio reads under 2.2 the message is genuinely hard to read; between 2.7 and 3.3 you are sending a clean fist.
Symptom:Some characters vanished from the Morse output
- Likely cause:
- Morse has no symbol for them. There is no code for #, %, emoji or most accented letters.
- What to do:
- The page lists exactly which characters it dropped above the output, rather than substituting a question mark that you would then transmit as a real question mark. Rewrite those characters as words, which is what operators do.
Things worth knowing
The code got a new character in 2004, its first since the war
The ITU added @ as .--.-. so email addresses could be sent — it is A and C run together, and it was the first addition to International Morse in over sixty years.
E is one dot because printers said so
Vail is said to have set symbol lengths by counting the movable type in a printing shop: the more of a letter the printer stocked, the shorter its Morse symbol. It is frequency-based compression, working eighty years before information theory named the idea.
The human record is 75.2 words a minute
Ted McElroy set it at a tournament in Asheville, North Carolina, in July 1939. At that speed a dot is sixteen milliseconds, and nobody is hearing individual elements — whole words arrive as single sounds.
Ñ is real, and the ITU never approved it
Spanish-language circuits have sent --.-- for ñ for a century, and it appears in no ITU recommendation. This page includes it anyway, because a translator that silently drops the letter is wrong in the language that needs it.
Morse survives because it is the narrowest thing a radio can send
Switching a carrier on and off needs perhaps 100 Hz of bandwidth against roughly 3000 for speech. Squeeze the same transmitter power into a thirtieth of the space and the signal punches through interference that would bury a voice — which is why amateur operators still work the world on a few watts.
Frequently asked questions
Is this Morse translator free, and does anything leave my device?
It is free and nothing leaves your device. The translation, the audio, the WAV file and the microphone decoding all run in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and there is no account.
What do the three controls do?
Speed is in words per minute against the standard PARIS word, and it governs everything on the page at once: the message, a character tapped in the chart, and the number of milliseconds past which the keying panel calls a press a dash. Pitch is the frequency of the tone in hertz — around 600 is what most operators settle on. Volume is the level of the tone, and it is carried into the WAV file as well.
How fast should I be learning at?
Set the character speed at 18 to 20 words a minute from the very first day and bring the overall speed down to whatever you can follow. Learning the characters slowly teaches you to count dots, and counting has a hard ceiling you will then spend months unlearning.
Can it decode Morse it hears through the microphone?
Yes, and that is what the last panel does. A narrow band-pass sits in front of the detector — the same thing a real receiver puts there — so only a sliver of the spectrum around the tone is listened to and the rest of the room is thrown away. Measured against mains hum and a fan, it kept decoding where the unfiltered detector heard nothing at all. Two things to know: it wants about -35 dB on the meter, and it has to hear a tone before it knows how loud one is, so under noise the first character of a transmission comes out wrong and the rest right. Send a few dits first — that is exactly why operators open with VVV.
Why does SOS come out as three separate letters?
Because you typed three letters. Sent properly as a distress call, SOS is one run-together symbol with no gaps between the letters, which is what makes it unmistakable. You will find it in that form in the prosign list on this page.
Does Morse code have numbers and punctuation?
Yes. Digits are five elements each and follow an obvious pattern — 1 is .---- and 5 is ..... — and there are symbols for the full stop, comma, question mark, slash, brackets and several more. All of them are in the reference chart, and all of them are supported here.
Can I save the audio?
Yes. The download button writes a WAV file of the message at the speed and tone you have set. It is generated from the timing directly rather than recorded from your speakers, so it carries none of your room or sound card.
Is Morse code still used?
Yes, though not at sea. Maritime Morse ended in 1999, but amateur radio still runs on it because a Morse signal survives noise that defeats voice, and aviation and marine navigation beacons still identify themselves in Morse — tune a VOR station and you will hear its letters repeating.
Can I learn Morse code on this page?
You can get a long way: tap any character in the chart to hear it, play a round where one sounds and you find it, and key it back yourself with the panel measuring what your hand actually sent. What this is not is a course. Getting fluent needs a growing character set, a record of what you keep missing and Farnsworth spacing, and a dedicated Morse trainer does that job properly. This page is the translator, the reference and the mirror.
What are the three keying instruments?
A straight key is one contact and you time everything yourself, which is what operators used before the 1950s and is still the hardest to do well. Paddles give you one element per tap — one side dots, the other dashes — so length stops mattering and only the side does. An electronic keyer repeats while you hold a side and alternates when you hold both, which is what "iambic" means and how most amateurs send today. J and K work as the two paddles, and the on-screen pads work with a mouse or a finger.
What does the practice panel actually measure?
On the straight key, your own timing and nothing else. It reports how many times you pressed, the length of your typical dot and dash, the ratio between them against the standard 3, the gap you leave inside a letter, and the message your timing genuinely spelled. Where there is not enough keying to measure something it says so rather than filling in a number. On the paddles and the keyer those lengths are generated by the page at the speed you set, so they are not a measurement of you and the panel does not print them as one — what stays yours there is the gaps you leave and what you end up spelling.
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