From telegraph clicks to dots and dashes
Before telephones, a telegraph operator could send a message down a wire using nothing but short and long clicks. Morse code was developed in the 1830s and 1840s for the electric telegraph, and it is still used in amateur radio and emergency signalling.
Written down, the signals appear as dots and dashes. In online converters a space usually separates letters and a slash separates words. Those are writing conventions, not signals that are sent.
The International Morse code standard is ITU-R M.1677-1, which defines the characters and their timing. The TextToolbox converter covers A to Z, digits, É and 13 punctuation characters from that chart, not every operating signal.
Timing carries the meaning
Timing carries the meaning. A dot lasts one unit and a dash three units. The gap inside a letter is one unit, between letters three units, and between words seven units.
That is why EE and E E are different. EE is two dots with a letter gap, and E E is two dots with a word gap. In the converter they look like ". ." and ". / .".
To decode, put a space between letters and a slash between words. A continuous signal with no letter gaps, such as ...---..., is rejected rather than guessed, while ... --- ... is the three letters S, O, S.
The converter does not detect direction; choose Text to Morse or Morse to Text. Playback uses a 600 Hz tone because Morse has no required pitch, and the timing of dots, dashes and gaps follows the standard. Conversion accepts up to 10,000 UTF-16 code units, but playback stops at 60 seconds, so copy the Morse text for a longer message.
Letters, a word, digits and one tricky pair
- A = .- E = . T = -
- HELLO = .... . .-.. .-.. ---
- EE = . . E E = . / .
- É? = ..-.. ..--..
- 1 = .---- 5 = ..... 0 = -----
Practice, puzzles and spacing drills
- Learning the code and practising the gaps between letters.
- Puzzle clues: encode a short message and give the reader the chart.
- Spacing practice with audio or light playback: compare EE with E E.