Timed to ITU-R M.1677-1
Morse Code Translator
Convert text to Morse code and back. Hear it at a speed you choose, see it as light, and copy it out, timed to ITU-R M.1677-1.
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.
Switch the output to Light to see the rhythm as flashes instead of hearing it (light mode is capped at 7 words a minute and plays no sound), and press Download .wav to keep the audio as a file.
How it is timed
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 2.58 seconds, because that is what defines 20 words a minute.
Three details of the output. The audio is shaped rather than switched, so there is no click at the start and end of each element, which matters if you listen for an hour. 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, rather than dropped: paste a paragraph and you can see what could not be sent.
One table for everything
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 offers a character the standard does not define, this site does not offer it. The exclamation mark is the usual example. Theabout page says how the tables and the audio are checked.
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 switch the output to Light to see it flash.
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, so you hear each letter as one rhythm instead of counting dots.
Which characters can be sent in Morse code?
The 26 letters, the ten digits, and the punctuation marks defined by ITU-R M.1677-1, plus the accented É the Recommendation includes and the small set of accented letters (À, Ä, Ç, È, Ñ, Ö, Ü) that older international tables carried. The Czech digraph CH is sent as one character only on the Czech version of the site; here it is C then H. The accented vowels common in Portuguese (á, â, ã, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú) are sent as their base letter. Anything else with no Morse equivalent stays visible in the output and is named below the fields, never silently dropped.
Is the timing correct?
It follows ITU-R M.1677-1: 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 about page describes how the timing is checked.
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.