How do I write Morse with spaces?

Separate the dots and dashes of each letter with a single space, and separate words with a forward slash. For example .... . .-.. .-.. --- spells HELLO and a slash starts a new word.

What is the timing of dots and dashes?

A dot is one unit long and a dash is three units. The gap between symbols in a letter is one unit, between letters three units, and between words seven units. This tool shows the pattern, not the audio timing.

Is this International or American Morse?

This chart uses International (ITU) Morse code, the global standard for radio and maritime use. American (Railroad) Morse, an older variant, differs for several letters and is not used here.

Why does SOS not have spaces in the famous signal?

As a distress prosign, SOS is sent as one continuous string ...---... with no inter-letter gaps. Spelled as three separate letters it is ... --- ... This tool encodes it letter by letter.

Which punctuation is supported?

The chart includes the common ITU punctuation marks: period, comma, question mark, apostrophe, slash, brackets, colon, semicolon, equals, plus, minus, and the at sign, among others.

Morse Code Reference Chart

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Morse code reference and translator

Morse code represents each character as a sequence of short signals (dots) and long signals (dashes). This tool both translates between plain text and Morse and gives you the complete International (ITU) chart, searchable by character or by pattern.

How it works

Each letter, digit, and punctuation mark maps to a unique string of dots (.) and dashes (-). Encoding looks up each character in the table and joins the results; spaces between words become a forward slash (/). Decoding reverses the lookup: it splits your input on spaces to get individual letters and on the slash to get word boundaries, then matches each pattern back to a character.

The code is designed for efficiency — the most common English letters get the shortest patterns. E is a single dot and T a single dash, while rarer letters like Q (--.-) and Y (-.--) are longer. This frequency-based design comes from Alfred Vail’s analysis of letter usage in a print shop.

Tips and example

The classic distress call SOS is ... --- .... As a true prosign it is sent without gaps, but spelled letter by letter the spacing is shown here.
Numbers always use five symbols each, stepping cleanly from .---- (1) up to ----- (0), which makes them easy to memorise.
When decoding, double-check your spacing: a missing space merges two letters into one invalid pattern, which shows as ? in the output.