Morse Code Chart — Every Letter, Number and Prosign, Hearable

How to use a morse code chart

There are four views above. Chart is every character with a rhythm phrase beside it — say the phrase out loud with the stresses and it matches the code exactly. The tree draws the whole code as branches, a dit going left and a dah going right. Timing shows what a dit, a dah and each gap actually measure in milliseconds at the speed you have set. Printable strips all of it back to one sheet of paper.

The honest warning first: a chart is a reference, not a course. If you learn morse by looking letters up here you will end up translating in your head — hearing the dots, picturing the row, reading off the letter — and that chain collapses somewhere around ten words a minute and cannot be repaired without unlearning it. Everything on this page is meant for looking something up, settling an argument, or printing out. The learning happens by ear.

The pairs that catch everybody

Six pairs of letters are each other played backwards, and they are responsible for a large share of all copying mistakes:

A ·− and N −·
D −·· and U ··−
B −··· and V ···−
F ··−· and L ·−··
G −−· and W ·−−
Q −−·− and Y −·−−

Reading them, the difference is obvious. Hearing them at twenty words a minute, it is not, because you are being asked to remember the order of something that lasted a third of a second. This is exactly why rhythm beats spelling: di-dah and dah-dit are two different sounds, where "dot dash" and "dash dot" are the same two words in a different order.

There is a second trap that is less talked about. Many letters are the opening of a longer one — an A is the start of J, L, P, R and W, and a D is the start of B and X. Commit too early and you will write down the short letter and lose the rest. The cure is not concentration, it is waiting: let the character finish before deciding what it was.

Why some characters take nineteen times longer than others

Everything in morse is built from one length, the dit. A dah is three of them, the gap inside a character is one, and the gap between characters is three. Add it up and a character has a cost:

E is a single dit — 1 unit, the cheapest character in the code
I and T cost 3, A costs 5
0 is five dahs with four gaps — 19 units

So a zero occupies the air for nineteen times as long as an E. That is worth knowing for two reasons. It explains why numbers feel so much harder than letters even after you know them: there is simply more to hold. And it is why a callsign or a signal report is the part of a contact people lose — those are the bits that are mostly digits.

Prosigns, and the ones that sound like punctuation

A prosign is two or more letters run together with no gap between them, used as procedure rather than spelling. Because they are just element patterns, four of them are identical in sound to a punctuation mark:

<AR>, end of message, is the same sound as +
<BT>, the separator between parts of a message, is the same sound as =
<AS>, wait, is the same sound as &
<KN>, go ahead named station only, is the same sound as (

That is not an error in the code and there is nothing to disambiguate at the level of sound. The meaning comes from where it appears: a = in the middle of a formal message is a section break, and the same pattern at the end of a transmission is a prosign. Decoding software gets this wrong constantly, which is one of the ways you can tell a machine copy from a human one.

Accented letters

International morse carries ten accented characters — À Ä Å Á Ç È É Ñ Ö Ü — and they are in the chart above. You do not need them to pass anything and you will never send one, but you will meet them coming the other way from continental European stations, and without them a name arrives looking like nonsense. Note that À, Å and Á share one pattern; as with the prosigns, context does the rest.

Printing it

The Printable view gives you a single clean sheet with no navigation, no colours and nothing that wastes ink. A printed chart pinned above the desk is genuinely useful in one specific way: as somewhere to look after you have missed a character, so you can carry on listening instead of stopping to think. Used that way it speeds you up. Used as a lookup table while the audio is running, it does the opposite.