Written by Alex Chen · Reviewed by Jane Smith · July 27, 2026
Convert between text and Morse code with audio playback. Supports A–Z, 0–9, and common punctuation.
Morse code trades on a simple idea: every letter, digit, and punctuation mark has a fixed pattern of dots and dashes. This page converts between plain text and those patterns in both directions, using the International Morse alphabet, the same code agreed on at the 1865 Paris conference and still used in aviation and amateur radio today. Type a message and the tool produces its dot-dash spelling; paste a Morse sequence in and it reads the text back out.
The best-known Morse message is SOS, the standard distress call. The tool encodes it letter by letter: S is three dots, O is three dashes, and the second S repeats the first letter's pattern. Letters inside a word are joined with a single space, so SOS becomes ... --- ....
Try the site's own initials the same way. T is one dash, L is dot-dash-dot-dot, and the digit 3 is three dots followed by two dashes, giving - .-.. ...--. Words are separated by a slash, so the two-word message "SOS TL3" reads ... --- ... / - .-.. ...--. Paste that back into the Morse-to-Text direction and the tool returns the original text, because each pattern maps to exactly one character.
The conversion is a table lookup, not a calculation. Each character in your input is matched against the alphabet's pattern list and replaced with its Morse spelling; the individual letters are then joined with spaces and words with slashes. The tool uppercases your input before encoding, because Morse has no lowercase forms, so "sos" and "SOS" are the same signal.
Characters outside the table, such as a backslash or a curly brace, are skipped rather than guessed, so the output never invents a pattern for something Morse does not cover. On the way back, the reverse lookup is exact: an unrecognized sequence is reported with a question mark instead of being silently misread, so you can spot the problem in your source.
Morse is defined by rhythm as much as by the dots and dashes themselves. The play button renders the current output as 700 Hz tones with proper International timing: a dot is one time unit, a dash is three, the gap within a letter is one unit, the gap between letters is three, and the gap between words is seven. With each unit set to 80 milliseconds, the playback runs at a steady listening pace that makes the letter boundaries audible even without training.
The alphabet does not stop at letters. Every digit from 0 to 9 has a pattern exactly five symbols long, so the digits read like a clock face on the air: 1 is .----, 5 is ....., and 9 is ----., while 0 is five dashes. Punctuation is covered too, including the period .-.-.-, the comma --..--, and the question mark ..--.., plus symbols like the apostrophe and the exclamation point that show up in everyday messages.
Because the map is symmetric, anything the encoder can spell out, the decoder can bring back. A period entered as text becomes .-.-.-, and pasting .-.-.- into the Morse input returns a period. That round trip holds for every entry in the table, which makes the tool useful as a teaching aid: encode a sentence, play it back, and decode your own transmission to check the rhythm.
The slash is the written convention for a word boundary in Morse, mirroring the seven-unit pause used on the air. A single space inside a word marks the gap between letters, so the slash keeps the two levels of spacing distinct on screen.
They are dropped from the output. If you encode text containing a hash or a caret, the rest of the message converts normally and the unsupported symbols simply disappear rather than producing a placeholder.
Yes. The Text to Morse button encodes, and Morse to Text decodes. Both use the same alphabet table, so anything the encoder writes, the decoder reads back.
At 80 milliseconds per time unit, a typical word of about 25 units takes roughly two seconds, which lands near the lower end of conversational Morse speed. It is slow enough to follow letter by letter.
Because International Morse does not distinguish case. Uppercasing input before encoding guarantees every letter finds its pattern, and it makes the decoded text consistent on the way back.
Morse survives where other systems fail. Amateur radio operators still use it on the low bands because a hand-keyed signal gets through when voice cannot, and aviation beacons identify themselves with Morse identifiers that pilots can decode from a simple code chart. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so the message you type never leaves this page.
Morse code began with a painter named Samuel Morse, who sketched an early electric telegraph in the 1830s and, with his assistant Alfred Vail, built the alphabet that carried the first long-distance message between Washington and Baltimore in 1844. Operators tapped a telegraph key that opened and closed an electric circuit, and a sounder at the far end clicked out the dots and dashes as a pattern of tones.
Radio inherited the code, and for decades every ship at sea carried an operator who could send and receive it by ear. The distress call SOS entered maritime law as a standard signal, and although modern satellites have replaced most of that traffic, the alphabet remains a fallback for emergency beacons and a rite of passage for amateur radio licensees.