Morse code writes each letter as a short pattern of dots and dashes, originally taps on a telegraph key. It was developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, and the first long-distance telegraph message, “What hath God wrought”, was sent in 1844. It was used for ships at sea, aircraft, railways and the military for over a century, and it is still alive among radio amateurs and pilots, who sometimes identify a navigation beacon by its Morse signature.
This tool converts text to Morse and Morse to text.
Writing Morse
Choose Encode and type. Letters become dots and dashes separated by spaces: “SOS” is ... --- .... Between words the tool puts a slash, so “HI THERE” comes out as .... .. / - .... . .-. .. Numbers are five signs long, 1 as .---- through to 0 as -----. Punctuation covered includes the full stop, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, slash, hyphen and at sign.
Characters not in the list, such as accented letters, currency signs and emoji, are skipped without warning; International Morse covers the plain Latin alphabet and a handful of symbols. If the output seems to be missing something, check for a character the table does not contain.
Reading Morse
Choose Decode and paste Morse with a space between each letter and a slash (or three or more spaces) between words. A group that does not match any known pattern is shown as a question mark, which usually means a mistyped dot or dash.
Typing Morse by hand with dots and dashes on a keyboard is easy to get wrong: the commonest mistake is using a long dash or an en dash instead of a hyphen. If decoding gives you only question marks, that is the likely reason.
Why SOS
“SOS” is not an abbreviation, whatever the popular explanations say. It was chosen as a distress signal in the early 1900s, because the pattern, three dots, three dashes, three dots, is simple, symmetrical and impossible to mistake for anything else. In real use it is sent as one run with no gaps between letters.
Timing, which text cannot show
In real Morse the rhythm is part of the code: a dash lasts three times as long as a dot, the gap between letters is three dot lengths, and between words seven. Text on a screen only shows the sequence. If you want to learn Morse for real, learn it by sound at a steady speed rather than by memorising the dots, since fluent operators hear letters as whole sounds.
For similar jobs, the NATO phonetic alphabet translator spells words for voice communication, the binary translator shows text as bits, and the Caesar cipher is a classic puzzle alongside Morse in escape rooms and scouting games.