Morse Code Translator

International Morse code maps each letter, digit, and common punctuation to a sequence of dots (·) and dashes (−). This translator runs both directions: text → Morse uppercases the input and looks up each character, with unsupported characters listed below. Morse → text splits on your chosen letter and word separators (defaults: single space between letters, ' / ' between words) and decodes back. Useful for ham radio practice, escape rooms, or just learning the code.

The code is deliberately uneven, and that is its cleverest feature. Its designers counted the letters in a printer's type case and gave the commonest ones the shortest symbols: E is a single dot and T a single dash, while Q and Y take four elements each. The effect is a variable-length encoding tuned to English letter frequencies, which is the same idea Huffman coding formalised a century later.

Timing is the part that written Morse throws away. In real transmission a dash is three dots long, the gap inside a letter is one dot, between letters three, and between words seven. Those ratios are what make the code readable by ear, and an operator's speed is measured by how fast the unit is rather than by any change in the pattern. Dots and dashes on a page capture the symbols and none of the rhythm.

The separators are why round-tripping needs care. Nothing in the audio marks a letter boundary except a longer silence, so written Morse depends entirely on the convention you choose for spaces. Text run together without separators is ambiguous: the same dot-dash sequence can be read as several different letter splits, and a decoder cannot resolve it without the gaps.

Support beyond the basic set varies by country. Accented letters, non-Latin scripts and several punctuation marks have regional or historical variants that never fully standardised, so a character this tool reports as unsupported may well have a code somewhere without having one everyone agrees on.