What is Morse code?
Morse code is a way of writing text using two signal lengths: a short dot (also called a dit) and a long dash (a dah). Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed it in the 1830s and 1840s for the electric telegraph, and it soon became the first widely used form of long-distance digital communication. Each letter, number and common punctuation mark gets a unique pattern. The most frequent letters in English get the shortest codes: E is a single dot and T is a single dash.
The version used around the world today is International Morse code, standardised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The original American Morse code, used on US railroad telegraph lines, has some different letters and uses internal spaces and longer dashes. Japan uses Wabun code to send katakana. MorsePad supports all three, so pick the alphabet you need from the selector.
Morse code is still used by amateur radio operators, in aviation and maritime navigation beacons, by people learning it as a hobby, and as an accessibility tool for people who can only make simple switch movements. Because a Morse message can be sent as sound, light, touch or marks on paper, it works when almost nothing else does.
How to use the Morse code translator
Type or paste text into the Text box and the Morse code appears instantly on the other side. Letters are separated by a single space and words by a slash ( / ). To go the other way, type dots and dashes into the Morse Code box and the English text appears as you type. If you paste Morse into the Text box by mistake, MorsePad notices and decodes it for you.
The decoder is flexible: it accepts periods, middle dots and bullets as dots, and hyphens, en dashes, em dashes and underscores as dashes. Word gaps can be written as a slash or a vertical bar. Use the style selector to show your output as plain ASCII (. -) or as bold bullets and dashes (• —), which look better in messages and designs.
Copy puts the Morse on your clipboard, Share link creates a URL that reopens with your message already loaded, Swap switches the two panels, and Clear starts over. If your text includes characters that have no Morse equivalent, they show up as # and are listed in a warning so nothing is lost silently. You can also send prosigns by writing them in angle brackets, like <SK> (end of contact) or <AR> (end of message).
Standard Morse code timing rules
Morse code is defined by rhythm, not just symbols. Everything is measured in units, where one unit is the length of a dot:
- A dot lasts 1 unit; a dash lasts 3 units.
- The gap between dots and dashes inside one letter is 1 unit.
- The gap between letters is 3 units.
- The gap between words is 7 units.
Speed is measured in words per minute (WPM) using the standard word "PARIS", which is exactly 50 units long. That gives a simple formula: one unit lasts 1200 ÷ WPM milliseconds, so at 20 WPM a dot is 60 ms long. Learners often use Farnsworth timing, where the characters are sent at full speed but the gaps between them are stretched. This helps you hear each letter as one sound pattern instead of counting dots. You can try this in the Morse audio generator or practise with the Koch method trainer.