Translate Text to Morse Code and Back
Morse code represents each letter and digit as a short sequence of dots and dashes. Developed in the 1830s for telegraph lines, it is still used today in aviation and marine navigation beacons, by amateur radio operators, and as an accessibility input method. This translator converts in both directions and runs entirely in your browser.
How is the code spaced?
Three levels of gap carry meaning. Within a letter, dots and dashes run together
(.... is a single H). Between letters there is one space
(.... . is "he"). Between words there is a slash with spaces around it, so
.... . .-.. .-.. --- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. reads "hello world". When
decoding, extra spaces are forgiven — runs of whitespace collapse to a single
letter gap.
Why does my decoded text come back as "Sos" instead of "SOS"?
Because Morse carries no case information at all. There is no separate code for an uppercase and a lowercase letter, so any decoder has to choose a convention. This one capitalizes the first letter and lowercases the rest, which reads naturally for sentences. If you need different capitalization, run the result through the Title Case Converter or the Sentence Case Converter.
What characters are supported?
All 26 English letters, the digits 0–9, and this punctuation:
. , ? ' ! / ( ) & : ; = + - _ " $ @. Anything outside that set is
dropped rather than guessed at, so an accented letter like é, an emoji, or a
symbol such as % or * simply does not appear in the output
— café encodes as the codes for c, a and f only. Line breaks are
dropped too, so a multi-line paste encodes as one continuous stream.
What are the most useful sequences to know?
| Meaning | Morse | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SOS | ... --- ... | The distress signal, sent as one unbroken sequence |
| E | . | The shortest code, given to the most common English letter |
| T | - | The other single-signal code |
| O | --- | Three dashes |
| Full stop | .-.-.- | Alternating, six signals long |
| @ | .--.-. | Added in 2004, the newest official character |
Code length was assigned by how often letters appear in English, which is why E and T are a single signal while Q and Y take four — an early and very effective piece of data compression.
Related tools
For other ways of encoding text, try the A1Z26 Cipher which maps letters to their position in the alphabet, the Binary Code Translator, or the NATO Phonetic Alphabet Translator, which solves the same "spell this out unambiguously" problem with words instead of signals.
Last reviewed: August 2026