Morse Code Translator With Sound: Text to Morse and Back
Type text and get Morse code, or type dots and dashes and get text. Press Play to hear it as a telegraph would send it, set the speed, and save it as a sound file. Nothing leaves your browser.
Morse code translator
Text to Morse and back, with the sound. Everything runs in your browser.
Pick a direction, type, listen, copy.
How this morse code translator works
International Morse code gives every letter, digit and common punctuation mark a pattern of dots and dashes. This translator looks each character up in that table, both ways: text to Morse code writes one pattern per character with a space between letters and a slash between words, and Morse code to text reads the patterns back. The table covers A to Z, 0 to 9 and eighteen punctuation marks, and it is not case-sensitive, because Morse has no capitals. A character the table does not know, such as an accented letter or an emoji, passes through unchanged rather than vanishing, and a pattern the table does not know decodes as a question mark so you can see where the code went wrong.
What it does not do is listen or look. Decoding a recording, a video or a flashing light is signal processing, a different kind of tool. This page translates what you type and plays what it translates.
Morse code with sound: timing, speed and the WAV file
The sound is a 700 Hz tone, the pitch most operators set their receivers to. The timing follows the PARIS standard that every Morse course and test uses: a dot is one unit, a dash three, the gap between the parts of a letter one, between letters three, between words seven, and the unit is 1200 divided by the speed in words per minute. At 20 WPM, the speed a licensed operator is expected to copy, a dot is 60 milliseconds. Learners usually start at 5 to 12 WPM, and the slider goes from 5 to 40.
The Download WAV button renders the same schedule the Play button uses into a 16-bit mono sound file, so what you hear is what you get, and the file plays anywhere a WAV plays: a ringtone, a scavenger hunt, a classroom, a puzzle. Because it is built from the schedule rather than recorded, it is exact to the millisecond at any speed.
SOS in Morse code, and the other patterns people look up
SOS is ··· ——— ···, three dots, three dashes, three dots, and it is sent as one run with no gaps between the letters, which is why it is written with a bar over it in formal notation. It was chosen in 1906 for that reason: it is unmistakable on a bad line. It does not stand for anything; the expansions people give it came later. Send it here with Play and you will hear the rhythm that every sailor and pilot learns first.
I love you is ·· / ·—·· ——— ···— · / —·—— ——— ··—, and help is ···· · ·—·· ·——·. The Morse code alphabet chart below has every letter and digit, so you can read a message by hand, and each row plays on its own so you can learn the sound of a letter rather than its shape, which is how operators actually learn it.
Morse code alphabet chart
Every letter, digit and punctuation mark the translator knows, from the same table it uses. Press ▶ on a row to hear that one pattern at the speed set above.
Letters (26)
- A·—
- B—···
- C—·—·
- D—··
- E·
- F··—·
- G——·
- H····
- I··
- J·———
- K—·—
- L·—··
- M——
- N—·
- O———
- P·——·
- Q——·—
- R·—·
- S···
- T—
- U··—
- V···—
- W·——
- X—··—
- Y—·——
- Z——··
Digits (10)
- 0—————
- 1·————
- 2··———
- 3···——
- 4····—
- 5·····
- 6—····
- 7——···
- 8———··
- 9————·
Punctuation (18)
- .·—·—·—
- ,——··——
- ?··——··
- '·————·
- !—·—·——
- /—··—·
- (—·——·
- )—·——·—
- &·—···
- :———···
- ;—·—·—·
- =—···—
- +·—·—·
- -—····—
- _··——·—
- "·—··—·
- $···—··—
- @·——·—·
Morse code translator questions
Does Morse code have spaces?
Yes, and they carry meaning. A gap of one unit separates the dots and dashes inside a letter, three units separate letters, and seven separate words. In writing, a space separates letters and a slash separates words; this translator reads both when decoding, and writes both when encoding. Morse code without spaces cannot be decoded reliably, because ···— could be S T, E E E T, I I T or several other things.
Is Morse code capitalized?
No. Morse has one alphabet, so A and a are the same pattern, ·—. This translator accepts either and decodes to capitals, which is the convention.
Does the translator do numbers and punctuation?
Yes. The digits 0 to 9 are five-element patterns (1 is ·————, 0 is —————), and eighteen punctuation marks are covered, including the full stop, comma, question mark, apostrophe, slash, brackets, colon, equals, plus, hyphen, quotation mark, at sign and dollar sign. The chart below lists them all.
How long is a Morse code dot?
It depends on the speed. Under the PARIS standard a dot is 1200 divided by the words per minute, in milliseconds: 60 ms at 20 WPM, 120 ms at 10 WPM, 240 ms at 5 WPM. A dash is always three dots long. Move the speed slider and the label shows the current speed; the sound and the WAV file follow it.
Can it translate Morse code from a sound, a picture or a flashing light?
No. This page translates typed text and typed code. Reading Morse out of a recording, an image or a blinking light needs signal processing that a lookup table cannot do, and a tool that claims to do it from a page like this is usually guessing. Type what you hear, with spaces between letters, and it will decode.
Why did my Morse code decode with question marks in it?
A question mark marks a group of dots and dashes that is not in the International Morse table, usually a missing or extra space that ran two letters together. Put a space between every letter and a slash between every word and try again.
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