Dots and dashes carried messages across oceans long before the internet, and they still show up in aviation, amateur radio and escape-room puzzles. This Morse code translator turns text into dots and dashes and decodes them back, character by character. It can also play the result as a series of beeps at a speed you choose, so you can practice listening, not only reading.
Translate in three steps
- Choose the direction: Text to Morse or Morse to text.
- Type or paste into the left box. The result appears on the right at once. Swap moves the result to the input and turns the direction around.
- Press Play sound to hear it, choose the speed from 5 to 30 words per minute, and copy the result with Copy.
How the code is written
- A letter is a group of dots and dashes, for example .- for A and -... for B.
- Letters are separated by a space, words by a slash with spaces around it.
- When decoding, the tool also accepts ·, •, – and — as dots and dashes, which helps with text copied from the web.
- Groups it does not know appear as a question mark, and the unknown groups are listed so you can fix them.
What is covered
The international Morse alphabet has the letters A to Z, the digits 0 to 9 and a set of punctuation marks: period, comma, question mark, apostrophe, exclamation mark, slash, brackets, ampersand, colon, semicolon, equals sign, plus, hyphen, underscore, quotation mark, dollar sign and at sign. The full table is a click away under the translator. Accented letters lose their accent, so é is sent as e. Characters with no Morse code, such as the hash sign or the euro sign, are left out and named in a note.
Speed and timing
Playback follows the usual PARIS standard: a dot is one unit, a dash three, the pause inside a letter one, between letters three and between words seven. At 15 words per minute one unit lasts 80 milliseconds. Beginners often start at 5 to 10 words per minute and raise the speed as the patterns become familiar. The tone is 600 Hz.
Everything stays local
Translation and sound are produced in your browser, so the text you enter is never sent anywhere.