Morse Code Translator: Text, Audio, and 12 Alphabets

The translator works in both directions at once. There is no mode switch and no Convert button: type in either panel and the other one follows. If you type letters, the tool converts text to Morse code. If you paste dots and dashes, it translates Morse code to text — the same result people search for asMorse code to English.

1. Type or paste your message. The text panel accepts letters, numbers and common punctuation. The Morse panel accepts dots, dashes, spaces and slashes.
2. Read the other panel. One space separates letters and a slash separates words, so a copied result keeps its boundaries. The counters show characters, words, marks and the estimated duration.
3. Listen, copy or share. Press Play to hear the code, use Copy Morse or Copy text, download a WAV, or copy a share link that keeps the message in the URL fragment.

The Morse panel also accepts newlines, three-space word gaps, middle dots (·), long dashes (—) and underscores, which is useful when you copy a code from a website, a book or a chat message. If a character has no code, it stays visible as a # marker instead of disappearing.

For a focused tool, open the text to Morse code generator or theMorse code decoder. Both use the same engine and the same spacing rules.

Morse code is a character encoding that uses two signal lengths: a short dot (dit) and a long dash (dah). Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed it for the electric telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s, and it became the first practical way to send text over a wire. The version used for radio, aviation and maritime signalling today is International Morse code, standardized as ITU-R M.1677-1.

It is not a language. The dots and dashes spell the letters of a language, which is whyMorse code to English is a mapping rather than a translation. The most common letters have the shortest codes: E is a single dot, T is a single dash, S is three dots and O is three dashes. That is also why SOS is short and hard to mistake for ordinary traffic.

A message can travel with any on/off signal — a radio tone, a flashlight, a whistle, a tap on a table or a phone vibration. The medium changes; the rhythm does not.

Every duration in Morse code is relative to one unit. A dot is one unit, a dash is three units, the gap between the parts of one character is one unit, the gap between letters is three units, and the gap between words is seven units. Once you know the speed of one unit, every other duration follows.

• Dot: 1 unit.
• Dash: 3 units.
• Inside a character: 1 unit of silence.
• Between letters: 3 units of silence.
• Between words: 7 units of silence.

At 20 words per minute one unit is 60 milliseconds. SOS written as three letters, ... --- ..., takes 27 units: 1.62 seconds. At 12 WPM the same signal takes 2.70 seconds; at 30 WPM it takes 1.08 seconds. The actual distress prosign is sent as one continuous group, ...---..., and takes 23 units instead.

The silence is part of the code. If you close the gap between two letters, the receiver hears one longer character. If you stretch the gap inside a character, the receiver may split it into separate letters. Read the full breakdown on the SOS in Morse code page.

WPM stands for words per minute, but it is a measure of speed rather than a count of the words in your message. Morse timing uses the PARIS standard: the word PARIS plus the space after it is 50 units. One unit is therefore 1.2 / WPM seconds. At 20 WPM the unit is 60 ms and 20 PARIS words fit into one minute.

Farnsworth timing separates the character speed from the effective speed. The characters stay fast enough to sound like letters, while the gaps between letters and words are stretched so a learner has time to write. The engine behind this site supports separate unit and fwUnit values; the speed slider here sets one WPM for both, which is the natural choice for sending a real message.

A lower WPM is not “easier” in the sense of a slower character; it changes the whole rhythm. Start at 12 WPM to learn the pattern, use 20 WPM for a standard pace, and move to 30 WPM when the letters are familiar.

International Morse code is the radio standard: the system used by amateur radio, aviation beacons, maritime signalling and the ITU recommendation. American Morse code, sometimes called railroad Morse, is an older landline system. It uses different codes for some letters and numerals, and it places internal spaces inside some characters instead of sending them as one continuous pattern.

The classic examples are C and O. International Morse sends C as -.-. and O as ---. American Morse uses internal spacing for both, so the same dots and dashes are grouped differently. A message encoded in one system will not decode correctly with the other. This translator uses International Morse code only.

That matters when you decode a historical message, a museum exhibit or a puzzle from an old telegraph manual. If the result looks like the right kind of code but the letters are nonsense, check whether the source is American Morse before assuming the decoder is broken. The rest of this site, including theMorse code alphabet, uses the International table.

The translator includes 12 character sets: Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Japanese (Wabun), Korean, Thai, numbers and punctuation. The Character set menu tells the decoder which table to prefer. Encoding searches every set, so ordinary Latin text works even if you leave the selector on another set; the selector matters most when you decode.

Shared codes are the reason the selector exists. ..-.. is É in Latin Extended but a different letter in Cyrillic; Thai ศ, ษ and ส have the same code; Hebrew final forms are positional variants of the same letter. If you decode English, leave the selector on Latin. If you paste a Cyrillic or Greek message, choose that set before reading the result.

The # marker is deliberate. It means the translator reached a character or a code it could not map, and it leaves a visible placeholder at that exact position instead of returning a result that looks complete. There are three common causes:

1. The character has no Morse code. Emoji, the euro sign and other symbols outside the International set cannot be encoded. Replace them with a supported spelling, such as EUR for €.
2. The code is not in the selected character set. A Cyrillic or Greek code may not exist in the Latin table, or the same code may belong to a different letter. Switch the Character set menu.
3. The spacing is missing or malformed. A code with the wrong number of symbols, or several letters run together, cannot be matched. Add a space between letters and a slash between words.

Invisible characters such as zero-width joiners and the byte-order mark are ignored rather than marked. If the source came from a chat app or a word processor, paste it into a plain-text editor first to remove hidden formatting. The Morse code decoder explains the same rules with examples.

International Morse code has 26 letters, 10 digits and a set of punctuation marks. Letters use one to four symbols; every digit uses exactly five, which makes numbers easy to recognize by length alone. The preview below shows the letters. The full page adds numbers, punctuation, click-to-hear audio and a printable chart.

The biggest mistake new learners make is memorizing the chart as a picture of dots and dashes. At real speed an operator does not count symbols; they recognize the rhythm of a whole letter, the way you recognize a spoken word. A visual table is useful for reference, but it is not how you become fluent.

The Koch method starts with two characters at a comfortable character speed, around 18–20 WPM, and adds two more only when you can copy the current set with at least 90% accuracy. Farnsworth spacing keeps the character speed fast but stretches the gaps between letters and words, so you have time to write without slowing the letters themselves.

Practise for 15–20 minutes a day rather than one long session a week. Start with common letters — E, T, A, N, I, M, S, O, R, H — and add the rest gradually. Use theclick-to-hear alphabet to compare letters you confuse, and theMorse code generator to turn short words into practice audio.