Morse Code Translator

Morse code alphabet chart

International Morse code covers the 26 letters A–Z and the digits 0–9. Notice the design logic: the most common English letters get the shortest codes — E is a single dot and T a single dash — while rare letters like Q and Y get four symbols.

SOS — the most famous three letters

The international distress signal SOS is ... --- ... — three dots, three dashes, three dots. Adopted worldwide in 1908, it was picked purely for its sound: no other short pattern is as hard to mistake in static or panic. Contrary to popular belief it never stood for "Save Our Souls" — the letters were chosen first and the phrase invented afterwards as a mnemonic. Type SOS into the translator above and press Play to hear exactly what ships' radio operators listened for.

How Morse timing works

Everything in Morse is measured against one time unit — the length of a dot:

• Dot = 1 unit of tone
• Dash = 3 units of tone
• Gap between symbols inside a letter = 1 unit of silence
• Gap between letters = 3 units of silence
• Gap between words = 7 units of silence

The silence carries as much information as the tone: without the 3-unit and 7-unit gaps, a stream of beeps would be unreadable. The Play button above follows this standard exactly with an 80 ms dot, which works out to roughly 15 words per minute.

More text & number tools

Curious what your message looks like to a computer? The binary translator turns the same text into 1s and 0s. The Roman numeral converter handles dates and years the ancient way, the number base converter switches numbers between binary, decimal, and hex, and the character counter counts the letters before you encode them.

Frequently asked questions