Morse Code Translator
Morse code translator that runs both ways, on 54 characters of the international table, with a Play button that beeps the result at 15 words per minute.
How to use
- Choose your direction in the first control group, Text → Morse or Morse → Text. The pane labels follow your choice.
- Type or paste into the left pane. The right one fills as you go, and the icon button beside its label copies the result.
- Hit Play to hear it, which turns that button into Stop, or Download WAV to keep the beeps as a file.
About this tool
The Morse code translator works in whichever direction you pick at the top of the panes. Text → Morse takes the words you type and hands back dots and dashes. Morse → Text does the reverse. Whichever one is selected gets written into the page address, so a link you save reopens on the same side, and the two panes relabel themselves to match.
It opens with SOS HELLO WORLD sitting in the input, which encodes to ... --- ... / .... . .-.. .-.. --- / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. so you can see the layout before you type anything of your own. One space separates letters. A slash with a space either side separates words. Decoding is looser than that: extra spaces are fine, and a slash jammed up against a letter still splits the word correctly.
The table covers 54 characters. Every letter, all ten digits, and eighteen punctuation marks and symbols, including the at sign, ampersand, dollar sign, brackets, colon, plus and equals. Morse has no notion of capitals, so hello and HELLO give identical code, and anything you decode comes back in uppercase.
Play turns the result into sound: a 600 Hz sine tone with a dot lasting 80 milliseconds, which is 15 words per minute on the usual PARIS timing. A dash runs three dots long, the gap between letters is three dots, between words seven. Download WAV writes those same beeps to a mono 22,050 Hz file called morse.wav, handy if you want the signal inside a video edit or on a phone.
Where it gets awkward
- International Morse only. American railroad Morse is a genuinely different code and is not in here, and accented letters like é have no entry at all.
- Encoding drops whatever it cannot map, without a warning. Paste an emoji or a curly apostrophe and it is quietly absent from the output. The straight apostrophe does have a code.
- Playback gives up after about 60 seconds and cuts off wherever it happens to be. Anything longer than a short sentence is better heard through the WAV download, which renders the whole message.
- Decoding depends entirely on your spacing. Two letters run together read as one group, and any group with no match becomes a # in the text with a count of them in the warning under the panes.
Frequently asked questions
What is SOS in Morse code?
Three dots, three dashes, three dots: ... --- ... written out. It became the international distress call at the 1906 Berlin radio convention because that rhythm is unmistakable and easy to send under pressure. The letters stand for nothing. Press Play on it and you will recognise the pattern from a hundred films.
How do I write a space between two words?
A slash does it. GO HOME encodes as --. --- / .... --- -- . with single spaces holding the letters apart and the slash marking where one word ends. On the decoding side the tool accepts a slash with or without spaces around it.
Does it matter whether I type in capitals?
Not at all, because the code itself has no cases. Hello, HELLO and hELLo all produce .... . .-.. .-.. --- and every decode comes back in capitals since there is nothing in the signal to say otherwise.
How fast are the beeps?
One dot lasts 80 milliseconds, which puts the whole thing at 15 words per minute, roughly where amateur radio operators start out. There is no speed dial, so if you are drilling towards an exam pace you will want software built for that.
Why did a # turn up in my decoded text?
That marks a group of dots and dashes with no match in the table. Nine times out of ten it is spacing: two letters typed with no gap between them arrive as one long symbol nothing can decode. The message under the panes tells you how many groups failed.
Can I keep the audio as a file?
Download WAV saves it as morse.wav, mono, 22,050 Hz, with the same 600 Hz tone and timing you hear from Play. Unlike Play it renders the message in full, so it is the better route for anything past a sentence.
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