Morse Code Translator: Text to Morse Code and Back

What is a Morse code translator?

A Morse code translator turns ordinary text into the dots and dashes of Morse code, and reads dots and dashes back into text — this one does both directions in the same box, updating the output as you type. Switch the Mode pills between Text to Morse and Morse to text, type or paste into the input, and the translation appears in the read-only output box, ready to copy with one click.

It doesn't stop at the page: press Play and the browser sounds out the signal as an actual audio tone, timed to the Speed slider, with a few milliseconds of ramp eased into the start and end of every dot and dash — skip that ramp and switching a tone on and off instantly produces the broadband click that radio operators call a key click. Underneath the tool sits a full Morse code chart covering every letter, digit and punctuation mark this translator knows, with the entries that aren't part of the official standard clearly marked.

How to use it

1. Choose a direction. Tap Text to Morse or Morse to text in the Mode pills at the top; the input and output boxes swap roles to match.
2. Type or paste, then check the counts. The translation fills the read-only output box as you type. The row underneath reports Characters, Skipped and Duration when you're encoding, or Characters and Unreadable when you're decoding.
3. Set the speed, listen, and copy. Drag the Speed slider or type a number from 5 to 40 words per minute (15 by default) to change the tone's pace and the duration readout, press Play to hear it — it becomes Stop while sounding — then hit Copy, which reads Copied! for two seconds.

How Morse timing actually works

Every element in Morse is measured against one unit: the length of a dot. A dash is three units. The gap between the dots and dashes inside a single letter is one unit, the gap between letters is three, and the gap between whole words is seven. Get any of those wrong and letters either run together or stretch apart until they sound like separate words — the mistake most web-based Morse tools make.

Speed is defined against a reference word: PARIS, chosen because it comes to exactly 50 units including its trailing word gap — .--. .- .-. .. ... works out to 43 units on its own, plus the 7-unit gap that follows a word. That's where the standard formula for a dot's length comes from: 1200 divided by words per minute, in milliseconds. At 20 WPM a dot is 60 milliseconds; at 10 WPM it's 120. Send the word PARIS W times over at W words per minute and it takes exactly 60 seconds, true at every speed this tool offers, from 5 WPM up to 40.

SOS gets special handling for the same reason. Sent as three separate letters — S, O, S — it comes to 27 units, because a 3-unit letter gap falls after the first S and after the O. Run together as the distress prosign it's written ...---... with no letter gaps at all, which brings it down to 23 units; that's why it's one continuous signal, not three letters typed in a row. At this tool's default 15 WPM, that whole signal takes 2.16 seconds.

What Morse can and can't carry

Morse itself holds less than people expect. There is no uppercase and lowercase: encode "sos" and "SOS" and you get the identical signal, so a translator that appears to preserve case isn't telling the truth about the medium. There's also no allowance for accents or non-Latin scripts. Encode "CAFÉ NAÏVE" and the É and Ï are reported as skipped rather than silently dropped or guessed at; Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Greek text produce nothing at all here — some countries did build their own historical Morse alphabets, but none of that is part of the ITU standard this tool follows.

The chart below the tool holds 26 letters, 10 digits and 18 punctuation marks in total, but only 13 of those punctuation marks belong to ITU-R M.1677-1, the current standard. The exclamation mark, ampersand, semicolon, underscore and dollar sign are in wide everyday use, and most online charts pass them off as official without saying so — this one marks them as unofficial instead. The newest character in the whole system is @, added in 2004 so that email addresses could be sent in Morse; its signal, .--.-., is simply an A and a C keyed together with no gap between them.

Worth being upfront about what this tool isn't. It translates text; it doesn't decode recordings, so it can't listen to audio, read a photo of a paper tape, or interpret someone tapping on a table. It also sends everything at one fixed speed. Real operators learn to copy Morse using Farnsworth timing, where the characters themselves are sent fast but the gaps between them are stretched out — this tool doesn't attempt that. And as with everything on FreeToGenerate.com, nothing you type is uploaded or saved: reload the page and both boxes are empty again.

Why is it free?

Every tool on FreeToGenerate.com runs entirely in your browser. There's no account to create, no watermark on what you copy, and no paid tier hiding a feature you actually need — the Morse translator works the same way, start to finish, with nothing sent to a server.