What this tool does
This Morse code translator goes both ways: type a sentence and get the dots and dashes, or paste dots and dashes and get the sentence back. It covers the complete ITU alphabet — 26 letters, 10 digits and 18 punctuation marks — and the whole table is printed on this page so you can check any character against it without trusting the box above.
You choose how the output is written. Dots and dashes can come out as the plain full stop and hyphen
you would type, or as · and − for reading. Words can be divided by a spaced slash or by three
spaces. Decoding accepts all of those, mixed, because Morse copied from somewhere else usually is.
Nothing plays sound. This translates written Morse, counts the timing, and stops there.
The silences are the code
Morse has three symbols, not two: the dot, the dash, and the absence of either. The standard fixes their lengths in time units. A dot is one unit. A dash is three. The gap between elements inside one letter is one, the gap between letters is three, and the gap between words is seven.
That is why the separator matters so much when Morse is written down rather than sent. .... ..
is HI, and . . .. - is EEIT — the same six elements, differing only in where the silences
fall. A translator that loses the gaps produces something readable and wrong, so this one keeps
letters one space apart and words a slash apart, and refuses to guess when the input has neither.
The time units also give you the standard measure of speed. PARIS, with the word gap that follows it, is exactly 50 units, which is the definition of one word for the purposes of words per minute. Divide 1.2 by the speed in words per minute and you get the length of a single unit in seconds: at 20 wpm a dot lasts 60 milliseconds. The panel above reports both the unit count of your message and how long it would occupy the air.
Variable-length codes, forty years before Huffman
Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail did something in the 1840s that information theory would only formalise
in 1952: they gave common symbols short codes and rare symbols long ones. E, the most frequent
letter in English, is a single dot. T is a single dash. Meanwhile Q is --.- and the digit 0 is five
dashes.
David Huffman's algorithm produces the optimal such code for a known frequency distribution, and Morse is a rough, hand-made version of the same idea. It is not optimal — the letter O is three dashes despite being common, and the digits are all five elements long for symmetry rather than for efficiency — but the instinct was right, and it is why Morse is faster to send than any fixed-length scheme of the same alphabet.
It is also why Morse is not self-delimiting the way a Huffman code is. Huffman codes are prefix-free by construction: no code is the start of another, so a stream can be split with no separators. In Morse, E's dot is the start of I, S and H, so the gaps have to be transmitted. Morse traded the prefix-free property for shorter symbols and paid for it with silence.
Where the alphabet came from
The version everyone uses is not the original. American Morse, used on land telegraph lines, had internal spaces inside some letters and varying dash lengths, which survived a wire but not radio. The Continental version tidied that up, and the ITU standardised what became International Morse — the table this tool implements, kept current in Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1.
Need to see text as raw bits rather than as rhythm? The text to binary converter shows the fixed-length encoding Morse deliberately is not.