Morse Code Alphabet

How to read the Morse code chart

Each card shows a character, its code as dots and dashes, and the same code as a pattern of short and long marks. A dot is a short signal and a dash is three times as long. Tap a card to hear it: the sound is what you learn in the end, and you can set the speed above the chart. To translate whole words and sentences, use the Morse code translator.

The timing rules

A dot lasts one unit and a dash three units. Inside a letter the parts are one unit apart, letters are three units apart and words seven units apart. These rules, like the codes on this page, come from the international standard, Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1.

Letters

The most common English letters have the shortest codes: E is a single dot and T a single dash, while rare letters such as Q, Y and Z take four symbols. No letter is longer than four symbols, and there is no difference between capital and small letters.

Numbers

Every number has five symbols and they follow a pattern. 1 is a dot and four dashes, and each number up to 5 swaps one more dash for a dot, so 5 is five dots. From 6 the dashes come first: 6 is a dash and four dots, up to 0, which is five dashes.

Punctuation and the @ sign

The standard includes the full stop, comma, colon, question mark, apostrophe, hyphen, slash, brackets, quotation marks, equals sign and plus sign, and the accented É. The at sign, .--.-., was added in 2004 so that email addresses could be sent. The exclamation mark, ampersand, semicolon, underscore and dollar sign are not in the standard, but the codes shown here are widely used and this translator accepts them.

SOS and the procedural signals

Procedural signals run letters together with no gap, so they sound like one long character. The best known is the distress signal ...---..., usually written SOS. It was made the international distress signal by the International Radiotelegraph Convention signed in Berlin in 1906, which took effect in 1908. Its three letters do not stand for anything: the pattern was picked because it is easy to send and hard to mistake. Other signals in the standard mark the start of a transmission, an error, a request to wait, and the end of work.

International and American Morse code

This chart is international Morse code, the version used for radio and taught today. The code first used on American telegraph lines in the 19th century, now called American Morse, is different: several letters have other codes, and some contain gaps inside them.

How to learn the Morse code alphabet

• Learn each character by its sound, not by counting dots and dashes. Counting works at slow speeds but becomes a bottleneck as soon as the code speeds up.
• Start with a few letters and add one at a time once you recognise them all. Hearing them at a normal speed from the start, with longer gaps between them, is the idea behind Farnsworth spacing, which you can switch on in the translator.
• Practise a little and often rather than in one long session.
• Print the chart and keep it nearby until you no longer need it. It fits on one A4 or Letter page.