Morse Code Decoder — Translate Morse Code to Text

Decoding is the reverse of generating: the receiver groups the dots and dashes into characters, then maps each group to a letter, number or punctuation mark. The hard part is not the table; it is knowing where one character ends and the next begins.

1. Paste the code. Put it in the right-hand panel. The example above already showsHELLO WORLD so you can see the format.
2. Keep the separators. One space separates letters; a slash separates words. If the source uses line breaks, the decoder treats each line break as a word gap.
3. Read or copy the text. The left panel updates as you edit. Use Copy text to take the result with you.

This is what people usually mean by Morse code to English: not a translation between languages, but a mapping from signal patterns to the characters of the English alphabet.

Morse code has no built-in way to mark the end of a character. The receiver relies on timing: one unit between the parts of a character, three units between letters, seven units between words. In written Morse, those gaps become a space and a slash.

... --- ... decodes to SOS. ...---... is one unknown group, not three letters, because the decoder cannot tell where one character stops. If your pasted code produces a single#, the first thing to check is whether the spaces between letters are missing.

Extra whitespace is harmless. The decoder collapses runs of spaces and accepts the slash with or without spaces around it. What it cannot recover is a boundary that was never written.

The # marker is deliberate. Instead of silently dropping a character or returning a result that looks complete, the decoder leaves a visible placeholder at the exact position that failed. There are three common reasons:

• The character has no Morse code. Emoji, currency symbols and other characters outside the International set cannot be encoded. Replace them with a supported spelling.
• The code is not in the selected character set. A Cyrillic or Greek code may not exist in the Latin table, or the same code may belong to a different letter. Switch the Character set menu to the right writing system.
• The code is malformed or has no separators. A code with the wrong number of symbols, or several letters run together, cannot be matched. Add the missing spaces and try again.

Invisible characters such as zero-width joiners and the byte-order mark are ignored rather than marked. If the source came from a chat app or a word processor, paste it into a plain-text editor first to remove hidden formatting.

The decoder supports more than the Latin alphabet. Use the Character set menu to choose Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Japanese (Wabun), Korean or Thai. The selected set is searched first, which matters when two letters share a code.

For example, ..-.. is É in Latin Extended but belongs to a different letter in Cyrillic. A Thai code can map to several letters that sound the same. Choosing the wrong set does not usually produce a visible error; it produces a plausible but wrong letter. If the decoded text looks like the right writing system but the words are nonsense, check the set before assuming the code is damaged.

For English text, leave the selector on Latin. For a message copied from a Japanese or Korean source, choose that set first. The Morse code alphabet page shows the Latin chart with click-to-hear audio.

Read the full story and timing of SOS in Morse code, or generate a reply with the Morse code generator.