Timed to ITU-R M.1677-1
Morse Code Translator
Convert text to Morse code and back. Hear it at any speed, see it as light, and copy it out, timed to the ITU-R M.1677-1 standard, never approximated.
Characters stay fast while the gaps stretch, so each letter arrives as one rhythm and there is nothing to count.
How to use it
Type or paste text in the left box; the Morse appears on the right as you type. Paste Morse on the right and the text appears on the left.
Press Play to hear it. Twenty words a minute is the speed operators send at; slow it down with the speed control, or turn on Farnsworth to keep the letters fast and stretch only the gaps.
Watch the light beside the controls if you want to see the rhythm, and press Download to keep the audio as a file.
What makes this one different
Most Morse code translators on the web get the letters right and the timing approximately right, and the approximation is the problem. Morse is a rhythm. A dash that is a little too short, or a letter gap that is a little too long, produces output that reads correctly on the page and wrongly in the ear, and the ear is where Morse is used. This translator takes its timing from the standard: at 20 words a minute the word PARIS takes exactly 2.58 seconds, because that is what defines 20 words a minute.
Three other things it does that most do not. The audio is shaped rather than switched, so there is no click at the start and end of every element, which is the difference between something you can listen to for an hour and something you cannot. The sound can be downloaded as a file, rendered from the same description that drives the playback, so the file is what you heard. And a character with no Morse equivalent is left in the output and named, where every other tool quietly drops it: paste a paragraph into one of those and you lose punctuation without being told.
Timed to the standard, and checked against it
Every code on this site comes from one table, and the table is ITU-R M.1677-1. Thealphabet page shows all of it, with a section for every character; the chart there is generated from the same table the translator uses, so they cannot disagree. Where a chart elsewhere offers a character the standard does not define, this site does not offer it. The exclamation mark is the usual example.
The build refuses to complete if a Morse code is found typed by hand anywhere in the copy, and it renders every message to sound and decodes it back to text before it ships. That is not a promise about carefulness; it is a check that runs every time, and the about page says exactly what it covers.
Learning, not just translating
A translator is the wrong way to learn Morse and the right way to look it up. If you want to actually read the code by ear, the learning page has the method operators use, two characters at a time at full speed, and thetrainer runs it: hear a group, type it, get scored per character, and earn the next one. The counting trap that every beginner falls into, where E is one dot and I is two and S is three, is explained there, and it is why the Farnsworth control exists on this page at all.
The rest of the surface
Generator for text to Morse with a file you can keep;decoder for reading pasted dots and dashes;audio for practice at a chosen speed and pitch;reader for decoding a sound through the microphone. TheSOS page explains why the distress signal is one symbol and not three letters, and why sending the word HELP is the worse choice. Letters grouped by length andnumbers with the one rule that generates all ten. TheNATO alphabet, because it is the other answer to the same problem, and tap code, because it works where Morse does not: through a wall.
Frequently asked
How do I translate text into Morse code?
Type or paste your text on the left. The Morse code appears on the right as you type. Press Play to hear it, or read the light beside the controls.
Does it work the other way, Morse to text?
Yes. Paste dots and dashes on the right and the text appears on the left. It reads the notations people actually paste: slashes or pipes between words, unicode dashes and bullets in place of the ASCII ones, uneven spacing. If your Morse arrived as sound, the reader page decodes audio.
What speed should I use?
Around 20 words per minute is the speed most amateur radio operators send at. If you are learning, turn on Farnsworth spacing: the letters stay at full speed while the gaps between them stretch, which is how the Koch method teaches you to hear a letter as one rhythm instead of counting dots.
Which characters can be sent in Morse code?
The 26 letters, the ten digits, and thirteen punctuation marks defined by ITU-R M.1677-1. Accented letters that the standard covers are sent as written; the rest are folded to their base letter. Anything with no Morse equivalent stays visible in the output and is named above the controls, never silently dropped.
Is the timing correct?
It follows ITU-R M.1677-1 exactly: a dash is three units, the gap inside a character one, between characters three, between words seven, and the unit at a given speed comes from the PARIS standard word. The audio is tested by rendering it to samples and decoding it back to text, at three speeds and with noise, and the build fails if the text does not come back.
Does anything I type get sent anywhere?
No. The translation happens in your browser. Nothing you type, play or download leaves your device, there is no account, and there is no tracking script on the page.