Morse Code

Translate text to International Morse code and back. Free, runs entirely in your browser — no signup, and nothing you paste in is uploaded.

Morse encodes letters as dots and dashes with lengths chosen by frequency — E is a single dot, T a single dash, while rarer letters run to four symbols. It is one of the earliest examples of what would later be called variable-length encoding, built by hand from how often letters appear in English.

The timing is the part text cannot show. A dash is three dots long, the gap inside a letter is one dot, between letters three, and between words seven. Which is why written Morse is unambiguous only if those gaps are preserved: without them, the same dots and dashes split into completely different words.