How to Use This Tool
Type in either box and the other follows. Press play to hear it at the correct timing, which is the part a written translation cannot show you.
The timing, which is the actual code
Everything in Morse is measured in units, and one unit is however long a dot takes at your speed:
- dot — 1 unit of sound
- dash — 3 units of sound
- gap between parts of a letter — 1 unit of silence
- gap between letters — 3 units of silence
- gap between words — 7 units of silence
This is why the gaps matter as much as the marks. Three dots separated by one unit each is S. The same three dots separated by three units each is E E E. Separated by one then three, it is I E. Nothing about the sounds themselves distinguishes them.
Why SOS is written ...———...
SOS is a prosign: a procedural signal sent as one continuous run with no letter gaps inside it. It is not the letters S, O and S sent in sequence — it just happens that those letters, run together, produce the pattern.
It was chosen in 1906 because it is unmistakable and easy to send under stress, not because the letters stand for anything. "Save Our Souls" and "Save Our Ship" are later inventions.
What Morse does not have
- Case. There is no capital or lowercase — the same pattern serves both.
- Most punctuation. The original standard covers full stop, comma, question mark and a handful of others. Exclamation marks and most symbols were added later or never standardised, and different references disagree.
- Accented letters, mostly. Some national variants exist for characters like É and Ä, and they are not universal.
Anything this tool cannot represent is passed through unchanged rather than silently dropped, so you can see what did not convert.
Learning it, if you want to
The one piece of advice that everyone who has learned it agrees on: do not learn the chart. Learning to see "dot dot dot" and mentally look up S builds a translation step you then have to unlearn, and it caps you at a very low speed.
The method that works is to learn the sounds directly at full speed with long gaps between characters, shortening the gaps as you improve. It is called the Farnsworth method, and it exists because the obvious approach is a dead end.
