Morse code
Translate text to Morse code and back in your browser, and hear it at any speed with correct timing ratios.
Runs in your browser
Sends characters at full speed and slows only the gaps, which is how Morse is taught.
Morse has no case and no way to write one. Everything comes back uppercase.
Hearing it is most of the point
Morse is a rhythm, not a row of dots and dashes. Reading ... --- ... tells you
almost nothing about what it sounds like, which is why the audio is here rather
than as an afterthought.
Everything is measured in one unit, the length of a dit:
| Units | |
|---|---|
| dit | 1 |
| dah | 3 |
| gap inside a character | 1 |
| gap between characters | 3 |
| gap between words | 7 |
Those ratios are the whole specification. Get them wrong — and generated Morse usually does — and the result is unreadable to anyone who can actually read Morse, even though every mark is correct.
Speed is in words per minute, measured with the standard word PARIS, which is exactly 50 units long. That is where the constant comes from: at W words per minute, one unit is 1200/W milliseconds.
Farnsworth spacing
Almost no online tool offers this, and it is how Morse is actually taught.
The problem with learning slowly is that a character sent at 5 wpm has a different shape from the same character at 20 wpm, and a learner ends up counting dits rather than hearing a pattern — a habit that has to be unlearned later.
Farnsworth sends each character at full speed and stretches only the
gaps between them. You hear the real rhythm of K from the first lesson,
with time to think between characters. Turn it on and the characters stay at
the speed you set while the spacing drops to a comfortable pace.
What it will and will not encode
Letters, digits and the common punctuation all have codes. Anything else does not — including all Chinese characters, since Morse predates any encoding for them and the Chinese telegraph code is a completely separate four-digit system.
Unsupported characters are named rather than dropped, because silently losing one changes the message.
Morse has no case and no way to express it, so decoded text is uppercase. That is not a limitation of this page; it is a limitation of Morse.
SOS is one symbol
SOS as a distress call is a prosign: nine marks sent continuously with no
gaps between the letters, which is not the same as sending S, O and S. It was
chosen for being unmistakable, not because it stands for anything — “Save Our
Souls” was invented afterwards.
Nothing is uploaded
Translated and played in this page.