MORSE REFERENCE
What is Morse code?
Characters carried by marks and silence
Morse is an encoding system that represents characters through short and long signals. The written symbols are dots and dashes; audio uses short and longer tones. A pattern such as .- represents A in International Morse. The gaps between marks, letters and words are part of the message.
It is not a language or a translation between languages. Encoding HELLO produces the patterns for those five letters; decoding returns the letters, not their meaning in another language. Interface language changes the website’s labels, not the character set supported by its encoder.
International Morse is the standard used by the examples and main reference chart here. American railroad Morse has different mappings and internal pauses. Japanese Wabun and Cyrillic mappings need their own references and context. Switching the interface to Japanese or Russian does not enable those conversions in this tool.
A simple message you can verify
Start with HI. H is four dots (....) and I is two dots (..). In the full message, a letter gap separates H from I. The pattern below shows that separation with a space. Try the audio and compare it with the two individual characters in the chart.
If you add a second word, a slash in written output marks its boundary. HI THERE becomes (.... .. / - .... . .-. .). A slash typed as an actual text character has its own pattern instead. Copying the marks without their separators can change the result.
A dot takes one timing unit and a dash takes three. Inside a letter the silence lasts one unit, between letters three, and between words seven. The timing reference works through these ratios and explains what the WPM slider changes.
Use the code for a specific task
For a written puzzle, the useful task is transcribing grouped marks accurately. For a personal design, check spelling, direction and boundaries. For listening practice, recognize the sound of a whole character and then learn to follow the spaces in a longer message. These are related skills, but they do not require the same exercise.
This site can encode supported text, decode written patterns, play ordinary-timed audio, show a light and save a WAV file. It does not automatically decode recordings or images. The corresponding guide pages explain those tasks and their limits.
The letters SOS can help remember a continuous distress pattern, but the actual signal joins all its marks without letter gaps. The dedicated comparison lets you hear how that differs from typing SOS into a normal text encoder. Distinguishing signals from ordinary words avoids a common mistake in beginner explanations.
Worked examples
These patterns use International Morse. Spaces separate letters; / separates words. A slash in the original text is encoded as -..-.
- HI
- Try this message
.... ..0.78 seconds at 20 WPM - HI THERE
- Try this message
.... .. / - .... . .-. .3.06 seconds at 20 WPM