Morse Code Decoder
Paste the dots and dashes and read what they say. Messy input is expected, slashes, pipes, unicode dashes and odd spacing are all normalised before decoding.
Characters stay fast while the gaps stretch, so each letter arrives as one rhythm and there is nothing to count.
What the decoder accepts
.and-, plus the unicode lookalikes people actually paste:• · − – —- A single space between letters, and
/or|between words - Line breaks and runs of spaces, which are collapsed and never treated as gaps
What it cannot do is guess. ... --- ... with the spaces removed is nine dots and dashes with no letter boundaries in it, and there is no way to recover where they were, several readings are equally valid. If your input has no spacing, the decode will be wrong, and no tool can do better.
Frequently asked
My Morse has slashes / pipes / long dashes in it. Will that work?
Yes. Real pasted Morse arrives in every notation people have invented: slashes or pipes for word gaps, unicode en-dashes and bullet characters instead of hyphens and full stops, and inconsistent spacing. The decoder normalises all of it before reading, because being strict about notation would just mean failing on most real input.
What if the spacing is wrong?
Then the letters are wrong, and no decoder can fix that, spacing is the only thing separating one letter from the next. If the result is gibberish, look at whether the word gaps are marked at all; unmarked gaps are the usual reason a decode comes out as one long nonsense word.
Can it decode a recording?
Not on this page. That is a different problem, because audio has to be separated from noise and the sender’s speed worked out before there are any dots and dashes to read. The reader page does exactly that, from your microphone or from a file.