Morse Code Translator

Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It was adopted internationally in 1906 because the rhythm is unmistakable and easy to send under pressure, not because it stands for anything — save our souls and save our ship were both attached afterwards. Formally it is a prosign, sent as one unbroken run of nine elements with no letter gaps inside it, which is why it is often written with a bar across the top. Any translation driven by a character table, this one included, writes it as three separate letters with normal gaps between them: perfectly readable, and not quite what a radio operator would key.

By ear, and fast enough that counting individual dots is impossible. The two established approaches both work that way. Koch's method starts you with two characters sent at your target speed and adds a third only once you are copying them accurately, so you never learn a slow version that has to be unlearned. The Farnsworth approach sends each character at full speed but stretches the gaps between them, so the rhythm of a letter is right from the first day while you still have time to write it down. What works badly is memorising a chart and translating shapes in your head.

Nine times in ten it is the spacing. A decoder works group by group and needs the boundaries handed to it, because a run of dots and dashes with nothing between them has many valid readings and no way to choose. If your source has lost its spacing you are not decoding any more, you are solving a puzzle, and that usually needs outside context — a guessed first word, a known name — to crack. The other common cause is the wrong character: an em dash or an en dash pasted in from a word processor is not the hyphen the table matches, so the group comes back unrecognised.

It is, though rarely as a way of sending messages professionally. Aviation and marine navigation beacons still identify themselves by repeating a two or three letter Morse ident, and pilots confirm a station that way before trusting it. Amateur radio operators use it heavily, because a carrier switched on and off cuts through noise and weak conditions at power levels that would defeat voice, with very little equipment. Maritime distress moved to satellite systems at the end of the 1990s, so the ship-to-shore role has gone. It also survives as an input method for people who can operate a single switch but not a keyboard.

Not case, no. There is one code per letter and no distinction between A and a, so typing your message in lower case changes nothing about what comes out. Accented letters do exist, but as national additions rather than part of the international set — the Spanish, German and Scandinavian variants were added by the countries that needed them, and no two published tables agree completely. The table here has none of them, so an accented character has no code to match. Newer symbols mostly never arrived either; the at sign was added in 2004 and is the most recent addition of any note.

Not here — this reads and writes text, and there is nothing in it that listens or watches. Doing it properly is a signal-processing job rather than a lookup: something has to detect where each tone starts and stops, work out the length of a single unit from the pattern itself, then classify every mark and every gap against that estimate. It is awkward because a human sender's timing drifts, especially on a hand key. With a recording in hand, the practical routes are a decoder app that takes microphone input, or slowing the audio down, writing the dots and dashes out by hand and pasting those in.

No. The whole thing runs inside the page you already have open: the character table is part of the JavaScript that was downloaded with it, both directions are plain lookups, and the component makes no network request of any kind. The tone is generated by your browser's own audio engine rather than fetched as a sound file, so even playing a message sends nothing. Nothing is kept, either — your text lives in the page's state and nowhere else, so closing the tab is the whole of the cleanup, and the audio is torn down when you leave rather than carrying on behind you.

They are two different codes, and only one of them is still in use. The original American or railroad Morse, used on landline telegraphs in the United States, gave several letters an internal space — a gap in the middle of a single character — and assigned different patterns to some letters and most digits. That worked over a wire and travelled badly over radio, where a short gap is easily lost to interference. International Morse, sometimes called Continental, dropped the internal spaces and is what every modern reference means. If your dots and dashes came off a nineteenth-century American telegram, a modern table will read parts of it as nonsense.