Morse Code Generator: Free Text to Morse

This morse code generator turns plain text into dots and dashes and decodes Morse code back into readable words. It is made for students, hobbyists, puzzle makers and anyone designing a message for a bracelet or necklace. Type or paste your input, press one button, and copy the result.

What Is Morse Code and How Does It Work?

Morse code is a way of writing text as short and long signals, shown on screen as dots and dashes. Each letter, digit and punctuation mark has its own pattern, such as one dot for E and one dash for T.

The system was developed for the telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. The version used today is International Morse Code. When sent as sound or light, a dash lasts about three times as long as a dot, the pause between letters is three dot lengths, and the pause between words is seven.

On a screen or on paper, those pauses become separators. This tool writes one space between letters and a forward slash between words. For example, the phrase HI YOU becomes .... .. / -.-- --- ..-. The decoder expects exactly the same layout, so anything you encode here can be decoded here.

How to Use the Morse Code Generator

You can convert in either direction with two tabs, one for each job. Follow these steps for the direction you need.

1. Pick a tab at the top: Text → Morse to write Morse code, or Morse → Text to read it.
2. For encoding, type or paste your message into the box (the hint shows Hello World). Click Load sample if you want to see a finished example first.
3. Click Convert to Morse. The Result panel shows your message as dots and dashes, with a space between letters and a slash between words.
4. For decoding, paste your code into the Morse box. Use a space between letters and a / between words, as the hint under the box says.
5. Click Decode Morse to see the plain text in the Result panel.
6. Click Copy to save the output to your clipboard, then paste it into your document, design file or message.

Worked Example: Encode and Decode SOS HELP

Say you are writing a clue for a scavenger hunt and want the phrase SOS HELP in Morse. Type it into the Text → Morse tab and click Convert to Morse. The result is ... --- ... / .... . .-.. .--..

To check your work, switch to Morse → Text, paste the output and click Decode Morse. You get SOS HELP back. A quick sanity test is to count the groups: each group between spaces is one character, so a clean result has the same number of groups as the original has letters and digits.

One detail for radio fans: the distress signal SOS is traditionally sent as one unbroken run of signals. This tool writes it as three ordinary letters (S, O, S), which is the usual way to display it in text and decodes back to SOS.

How Do You Read and Fix the Results?

The Result panel shows your output in a box with a Copy button above it, and a good result contains only dots, dashes, spaces and slashes. A question mark anywhere means the tool could not match something.

Reading encoded output

The tool converts everything to capitals first, so Hello and HELLO give identical code. Each letter, digit or supported symbol becomes one group. The supported punctuation is the period, comma, question mark, apostrophe, exclamation mark, slash, parentheses, ampersand, colon, semicolon, equals sign, plus sign, hyphen, underscore, double quote, dollar sign and at sign.

Anything outside that list becomes a question mark. Common causes are accented letters, emoji, symbols such as # or %, square brackets, curly (smart) quotes copied from a word processor, and line breaks. Fix them by replacing each with a plain keyboard character and keeping the message on one line. If emoji are the problem, the Emojis Remover can strip them before you convert.

Reading decoded output

Decoded text always appears in capital letters, because Morse has no upper or lower case. If you need a different style, run the result through a text case changer to get sentence case or lowercase.

A question mark in decoded text means a group did not match any known pattern. The usual causes are:

• A missing space, which glues two letters into one unknown group (for example ......- instead of .... ..-).
• A typo, such as one dot too many or too few.
• Look-alike symbols, such as an en dash, a long dash or a bullet pasted instead of a plain hyphen and period.

Extra spaces between groups are ignored, so you do not need to clean those up. Find the broken group by counting characters against what you expected the word to be.

Who Uses a Text to Morse Code Converter?

A text to Morse code converter helps anyone who needs a quick, correct pattern without looking up every letter in a chart. These are the most common situations.

• Jewelry and gifts: Encode a name, date or short word such as LOVE, then treat dots as small beads and dashes as long beads for a bracelet, necklace or keychain. The word I LOVE YOU encodes to .. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-.
• Learners and teachers: Generate practice scripts, then decode them yourself to test your reading speed. Frequent letters are short in Morse (E is one dot), and you can see why with a character frequency counter on any paragraph.
• Puzzle and escape-room designers: Hide a clue in dots and dashes, and decode players' guesses to verify them.
• Amateur radio and scouting groups: Write out callsigns, numbers and short messages for practice sessions.
• Writers and content creators: Add Morse lines to cards, captions or posters, and pair them with stylized text for the plain-language version.
• Curious coders: Compare how different encodings work, for example by trying binary to text after Morse.

Best Practices and Troubleshooting Tips

Most problems come from input formatting rather than the conversion itself, so a few habits prevent nearly all errors.

• Use plain characters. Type the period and hyphen from your keyboard when writing Morse by hand. Do not paste from documents that auto-format dashes.
• Separate words with a slash. A slash on its own is the word break. Spaces around it make the code easier to read, though the decoder also accepts a slash with no spaces.
• Keep it to one line. A line break in text-to-Morse input becomes a question mark. Convert each line separately if you need several lines.
• Proofread before copying. If the Result contains a question mark, fix the source and convert again rather than editing the Morse by hand.
• Test the round trip. Paste your encoded result into the Morse → Text tab. If the original text returns, the code is correct.
• Use the samples. Load sample on either tab runs a built-in example so you can confirm the format before using your own text.

Some searchers expect a phone keyboard when they type queries like Morse keyboard on Gboard. This page is not a keyboard app. You type or paste into the box, convert, and copy the result into any app.

What Are the Limits of This Morse Code Translator?

This tool produces and reads written Morse only. It does not play beeps, flash light, record audio or create an MP3, and it cannot listen to a recording and transcribe it. If you need sound, copy the dots and dashes and use them as a script for another sound source.

It covers the 26 English letters, the digits 0 to 9 and the punctuation listed above. Letters with accents and non-Latin alphabets are not converted. Each input can be up to 50,000 characters, which is far more than a typical message needs. Because the tool marks unknown characters with a question mark, it will not tell you why a character failed. Use the tips above to track it down.

Type a short message into the box on this page, press the button, and copy your dots and dashes in seconds. For more converters and formatting helpers, browse the full text utility tools collection.