What is SOS in Morse code?
SOS is ... --- ...: three dots, three dashes, three dots. The dots are the letter S and the dashes are the letter O. It became the international distress signal because the rhythm is simple to send and impossible to mistake, not because it abbreviates any phrase; save our souls was attached to it after the fact.
How does it know whether to encode or decode?
It looks at what you typed. Input made up only of dots, dashes, slashes, pipes, and spaces is treated as Morse and decoded. Everything else is treated as text and encoded. The one awkward case is a text input that happens to contain only those characters, such as a lone hyphen, which will be decoded instead.
How are letters and words separated?
Letters are separated by a single space and words by a slash with spaces around it, which is the standard written convention. When decoding, both a slash and a pipe are accepted as word separators, which covers most of the ways Morse is written down.
How do I read Morse code timing?
In transmission, a dot lasts one unit and a dash lasts three. The silences carry the structure: one unit between marks inside a letter, three units between letters, and seven between words. In writing, those silences become a space between letters and a slash between words, which is the format this tool reads and writes.
Does SOS encode as one continuous signal?
No. It is encoded as three letters, S, O, and S, with the normal letter gaps between them. The true distress signal is sent as one unbroken prosign with no gaps, and prosigns are not supported here.
Which characters can it translate?
The full international set of 54 symbols: the letters A to Z, the digits 0 to 9, and 18 punctuation marks including period, comma, question mark, apostrophe, slash, brackets, and the at sign. Anything outside that set, such as emoji or Cyrillic, is dropped silently, so round-trip the output when the message matters.
What happened to my accented letters?
They are not in the character map, so they are removed with no warning. International Morse has extensions for some accented letters, but they are not supported here. Replace accented letters with their base letters before encoding.
Why is the decoded text all in capitals?
Morse does not encode letter case. The map is uppercase, so anything decoded comes back uppercase. Run the result through the Sentence Case Converter if you want it to read as prose.
Can it play Morse code as sound or flash it as light?
No. This is a text translator: it converts between written text and written dots and dashes. It does not beep, blink, or listen to audio, so for practicing by ear you will need a separate trainer.
Is this Morse code translator free?
Yes. It is completely free, with no account and no signup, and the translation runs locally in your browser, so nothing you type is uploaded anywhere.