Morse Code Translator
Translate text into Morse code (dots and dashes).
How to use the Morse Code Translator
- Type or paste your text.
- Copy the Morse code — letters are separated by spaces, words by a slash.
About the Morse Code Translator
Morse code represents each character as a sequence of dots and dashes. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed it for the electric telegraph, where a single wire could carry only one signal — on or off — and the length of each press carried the information. The letter frequencies of English shaped the code directly: the most common letters were given the shortest sequences, so E is a single dot and T a single dash, while uncommon letters like Q and Y take four symbols each. Assigning short codes to frequent symbols is the same principle data compression rests on today.
It has proved remarkably hard to kill, because it degrades so gracefully. Aviation navigation aids still identify themselves by transmitting their Morse identifier on a loop, and pilots confirm they have tuned the right station by ear. Amateur radio operators still use it, because a human ear can pull a Morse signal out of noise that would swallow speech entirely. SOS — ... --- ... — was chosen because it is unmistakable as a single unbroken pattern; it does not stand for “Save Our Ship”, a reading attached to it long afterwards.
This translator works in both directions and picks the direction for you: text goes in and Morse comes out, and dots and dashes go in and letters come out. There is no mode to switch, because the two alphabets have nothing in common — anything made only of dots, dashes, slashes and spaces can only be Morse. Letters are separated by a single space and words by a forward slash. Encoding covers A–Z, the digits 0–9 and common punctuation, and silently drops anything it has no code for, so check the result if your text contains unusual symbols or non-Latin characters. Decoding marks any sequence it does not recognise with a # rather than dropping it. Case is ignored, since Morse has none. Everything runs in your browser. For another way of representing text as symbols, see the text to binary converter.
Frequently asked questions
How are spaces and words shown?
Letters within a word are separated by a single space, and words are separated by a forward slash. So "hi there" becomes the code for h, a space, the code for i, a slash, then the letters of "there".
Can it decode Morse code back into text?
Yes. Paste dots and dashes and you get letters back. The tool detects the direction automatically: input made up only of dots, dashes, slashes and spaces is treated as Morse to decode, and anything else is treated as text to encode.
What happens to a sequence it does not recognise?
When decoding, an unknown group of dots and dashes is replaced with a # so you can see exactly where the problem is. When encoding, a character with no Morse equivalent is dropped from the output without a warning.
Which characters are supported?
The letters A to Z, the digits 0 to 9, and common punctuation including full stop, comma, question mark, apostrophe, exclamation mark, slash, brackets, ampersand, colon, semicolon, equals, plus, hyphen, underscore, quotation mark and at sign.
Does capitalisation matter?
No. Morse code has no concept of upper and lower case, so text is treated as uppercase and "SOS", "sos" and "Sos" all produce identical output. Decoding always returns uppercase.
Why is E just one dot?
Because E is the most common letter in English, and the code was designed so the most frequent letters take the least time to send. T, the next most common, is a single dash. Rare letters were given longer sequences.