Convert text to Morse code, or Morse code back to text — both directions, entirely in your browser.
Calculator verified • Last updated: August 2026
Letters separated by a space, words separated by " / ".
Morse code represents every letter and digit as a sequence of dots (short signals) and dashes (long signals). This translator uses the International Morse Code standard, covering A-Z and 0-9. Converting text to Morse looks up each character's code and joins them with a single space between letters; converting Morse back to text does the reverse, splitting on spaces to find each letter's code and looking up the matching character.
Within a word, individual letters are separated by a single space in the Morse output. Between whole words, this tool uses the standard convention of a forward slash surrounded by spaces (" / ") — so "SOS HELP" becomes two Morse words separated by a slash, not just extra spacing, which keeps word boundaries unambiguous when converting back.
"SOS" translates letter by letter: S is three dots (...), O is three dashes (---), S is three dots again (...). Joined with single spaces between letters, the result is "... --- ...". Converting that string back splits on the spaces, looks up each of the three codes, and reconstructs "SOS" exactly.
Morse code was developed in the 1830s and 40s by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for early telegraph systems, where operators could only reliably transmit distinct short and long electrical pulses over a wire — not full letters directly. Assigning shorter codes to the most frequently used letters (E is a single dot, the single most common letter in English) made messages faster to send on average, an early example of frequency-based encoding efficiency.
Forgetting the letter-vs-word space distinction is the most common translation error when typing Morse by hand — a single space is a letter boundary, while a missing slash between words merges them into one long, unreadable string of dots and dashes. Case sensitivity is a non-issue with Morse itself (it has no concept of upper/lowercase), but some people mistakenly expect a translator to preserve case when converting Morse back to text — this tool, like the Morse standard itself, outputs uppercase only.
A single space separates the Morse code for individual letters within a word, and a slash surrounded by spaces ( / ) separates whole words — this tool follows that standard convention in both directions.
Text is uppercased automatically before conversion, since Morse code doesn't distinguish case. Letters A-Z and digits 0-9 are fully supported, plus a few common punctuation marks.
Any code that doesn't match a known letter or digit is skipped and flagged rather than breaking the rest of the translation, so the rest of your message still comes through.