The Morse Code Alphabet

How to read the chart

A dot is one short beat. A dash lasts three times as long. Inside a letter the signals are separated by a single beat of silence, and between letters the gap is three beats. Nothing else is needed to read the whole chart.

The alphabet is not random

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail did not assign the codes arbitrarily. They counted how many of each letter a printer kept in his type case, treating that as a rough measure of how often the letter appears in English, and gave the most common letters the shortest signals.

That is why E is a single dot and T is a single dash, while Q, Y and Z, which turn up far less often, are four signals long. The alphabet is essentially a compression scheme designed a century before anyone used that word.

Mirror pairs cut your work in half

Several letters are exact reverses of each other. A is dot dash and N is dash dot. D is dash dot dot and U is dot dot dash. B is dash dot dot dot and V is dot dot dot dash. Learn one and you have quietly learned the other.

Prosigns, the shorthand operators really use

Beyond letters, operators send short procedural signals with no gaps inside them. These are the ones worth knowing:

Punctuation and other alphabets

The international standard also defines punctuation and a set of accented letters, and Russian has its own Cyrillic Morse alphabet built on the same signals. The translator on this site handles all of them.