Morse Code Translator — Text to Morse with Audio and .wav

Using the morse code translator

Both boxes are live and both directions work. Type plain text on the left and the dots and dashes appear as you go; paste dots and dashes on the right and the text appears instead. Lower case is fine — morse draws no distinction between cases, so it is simply read as capitals.

The bar underneath is the actual keying, drawn to scale: long blocks are dahs, short ones dits, and the wide gaps are the spaces between words. It is the clearest picture of why morse timing is about silence as much as sound. Below that you can hear it at any speed and pitch, save it as a real .wav file, or copy a link that opens this page with your text already loaded.

How morse is written down — and why the spacing is the whole thing

Written morse uses a space between characters and a slash between words:

SOS SOS → ··· −−− ··· / ··· −−− ···

Those spaces are not decoration. They carry as much meaning as the dots, and leaving them out makes the result genuinely ambiguous rather than merely untidy. The classic case:

H then E is ···· ·
5 is ·····

Written without the gap, both are five dots. On the air there is no ambiguity at all — the ear hears a clear pause between the H and the E, and a five arrives as one unbroken run. The confusion is created purely by writing it down. The same trap catches E T (· −) against A (·−), and dozens of others.

So if you are copying morse out of a book, off a headstone, or from a photograph, and it does not make sense, look at the gaps before you doubt the code. Nine times in ten the spacing was lost by whoever transcribed it.

Putting a name or a date into morse

A good share of the people who reach a translator are not learning morse at all — they want a name, a date or a short phrase for a piece of jewellery, an engraving or a tattoo. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and there are three things worth knowing before it becomes permanent:

Get the spacing right. A necklace that renders your initials with no gaps says something else entirely. Use the output above exactly as it appears, slashes and all, or agree with the maker how word breaks will be shown.
Numbers are long. A date in morse is far bigger than you expect — every digit is five elements, so 1999 alone runs to nearly seventy dit-lengths. Look at the keying bar above before committing to a design.
Listen to it once. Press play. If it sounds like what you meant, it is right. It is the only check that tests the spacing as well as the characters.

What this page cannot do

It cannot listen. This translates text you type — it does not decode a sound. If you have a recording, or a signal coming out of a radio, that is a different and much harder job, and it lives on the decoder, which listens through your microphone or reads an audio file.

And it will not teach you morse. Nobody has ever learned the code by converting text on a screen, because the thing being practised is reading dots — which is the one skill that has to be unlearned later. If you have arrived here wanting to actually learn it, start the course instead: two characters, by ear, at full speed.

Characters morse does not have

International morse covers the twenty-six letters, the ten digits, a modest set of punctuation, and ten accented characters used by European stations. Anything outside that — #, %, emoji, and most symbols on a keyboard — has no representation at all and is skipped, with a note telling you what was dropped. There is no official morse for them, so inventing one would produce something no operator could read.

Why the .wav is worth more than a recording you find elsewhere

Every audio file on this site is generated at the moment you ask for it, at the speed and pitch you have chosen. That matters because a recording locks its speed forever, and speed is the one thing a learner needs to change every week. Download the same phrase at 8 words a minute today and 18 next month, and you have a training progression rather than a souvenir.