Morse Code Converter

Type a message and watch it become dots and dashes, or paste Morse and read it back as plain text, with an audio playback button for practice.

What is the Morse Code Converter?

Morse code represents each letter, digit and punctuation mark as a short sequence of dots and dashes, originally sent as tones, flashes or key clicks over a single on-off channel. This converter carries a table covering A through Z, the digits 0 through 9, and punctuation including period, comma, question mark, colon, ampersand, plus sign and at sign. Encoded output separates letters with a single space and words with a forward slash, the convention most written Morse follows. Characters with no entry in the table, such as accented letters and emoji, are silently dropped rather than passed through.

Key Features

• Two direction tabs: text to Morse, and Morse back to text
• Audio playback at 700 Hz, with dashes three times a dot
• Scrollable reference table listing every supported character and its code
• Encoding updates as you type, with no convert button to press
• Copy button places the finished dots and dashes on your clipboard

Common Use Cases

• Practicing receiving by ear before a ham radio license exam
• Decoding a Morse string hidden in a puzzle, escape room or game
• Preparing a signal card for a scouting or emergency communications exercise
• Turning a short phrase into dots and dashes for jewelry or engraving layouts

How to Use the Morse Code Converter

1. Pick the Text to Morse tab to encode, or the Morse to Text tab to decode.
2. Type or paste into the input box, replacing the sample phrase that loads there.
3. Read the result in the monospace panel, where spaces divide letters and a slash divides words.
4. Press Play to hear the message keyed as tones; the button reads Playing until the sequence finishes.
5. Press Copy to lift the result, or Swap to push it back into the input box.

Tips for Best Results

• Set the direction tab before pasting, because switching tabs reloads the sample and wipes the box.
• Decoding tolerates ragged spacing: letters split on any run of spaces, words on the slash.
• Unsupported characters vanish instead of raising an error, so check the output if something looks short.
• Playback runs at one fixed speed, so pair it with the reference table when learning new characters.

Why Use WiserWork's Morse Code Converter?

Most Morse pages hand you a lookup table and leave the keying to your imagination. This one plays the result through the Web Audio API at a fixed dot length of 0.08 seconds, which is the part that actually builds recognition, since operators learn characters as rhythms rather than as printed symbols. The whole table and the tone generator live inside the page, so nothing you type is transmitted anywhere.

Who Uses the Morse Code Converter?

Amateur radio operators drilling for a license, puzzle designers building a cipher into a game, and scouts working through a signaling badge all reach for a converter like this. Teachers use it to demonstrate how a single on-off channel can carry an entire alphabet, and hobbyists use it to lay out dot-and-dash bracelets or engraved gifts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which characters can this converter encode?

The table covers A to Z, 0 to 9, and punctuation including period, comma, question mark, apostrophe, exclamation mark, slash, parentheses, ampersand, colon, semicolon, equals, plus, hyphen, underscore, quotation mark, dollar sign and at sign. Anything outside that list is dropped from the output.

Is the input case sensitive?

No. Every character is uppercased before lookup, because Morse has no separate capital forms. HELLO and hello produce identical dots and dashes.

How are letters and words separated?

A single space divides letters and a forward slash divides words. When decoding, the slash marks the word boundary and any run of spaces marks a letter boundary.

How fast is the audio playback?

Each dot lasts 0.08 seconds and each dash 0.24 seconds, played as a 700 Hz sine tone. That dot length works out to roughly 15 words per minute on the usual PARIS measure, and the speed is not adjustable.

Does it handle prosigns like SOS as a single symbol?

No. A true prosign is keyed with no letter gap, so SOS becomes one nine-element burst. This converter encodes each letter separately and inserts the normal letter space between them.

Can I decode Morse written with bullet or underscore characters?

Only the period and the hyphen are recognized. Swap any other dot or dash glyph for a plain full stop and hyphen before pasting, or the sequence will not match the table.

What happens to an invalid Morse sequence?

Groups that are not in the table contribute nothing to the decoded text. A mistyped element makes its letter disappear rather than triggering a warning, so a short result usually points to a typo in the input.

Why did my accented letters disappear?

There are no entries for accented forms such as e-acute or u-umlaut, nor for emoji, and unmapped characters are skipped while encoding. Strip accents first if those letters need to be represented.

Do I need speakers to use the Play button?

Yes. The tones are synthesized with the Web Audio API and sent to your device's normal audio output. Nothing is downloaded, since the browser generates the sine wave in real time.

Can I save the audio as a file?

Not from this page. Playback is generated live and there is no recording or export option, so use separate recording software if you need an audio file.

Morse survives because it needs so little: one tone, one switch, and a shared sense of rhythm. Encode a phrase, play it back a few times, and the pattern starts arriving as sound rather than as printed dots.