How do you translate morse code into English?

Paste the dots and dashes above with single spaces between letters and a forward slash between words. The translator returns the decoded English sentence in real time using the international ITU morse alphabet.

What do the dots and dashes actually mean?

A dot is a short pulse (one time unit). A dash is a long pulse (three time units). Each letter of the English alphabet is a unique combination of one to five such pulses — the decoder maps each back to its letter.

Can this decode audio recordings of morse?

Not directly — this tool decodes written morse. For audio, you'd need a CW decoder that listens via your microphone and transcribes to dots and dashes first. Paste that output here to finish the decode to English.

Morse Code to English Translator

How the decoder parses your input

Morse has three meaningful gap lengths: 1 unit between the dots/dashes within one letter, 3 units between letters, and 7 units between words. In written form, those collapse to: no gap inside a letter, one space between letters, one forward slash between words. The decoder understands both strict /-separated input and the looser convention of “triple space = word break.”

We also forgive common typing habits: extra whitespace around slashes, mixed use of long dashes (—) instead of hyphens, and trailing spaces. If something doesn't parse, the decoder skips that one sequence and keeps going — you'll usually still get 90% of the message back.

Decoding a photograph or screenshot

A common use: someone posts a morse-code tattoo or bracelet and you want to know what it says. Quick workflow:

Transcribe the dots and dashes from the photo into the input above.
Use . for small beads (dots) and - for bar beads (dashes).
Put a single space between each letter's symbols and a forward slash (/) wherever you see a distinct spacer bead or wider gap.
Hit enter and read the English output. If it's gibberish, try adjusting the word breaks.

Limitations worth knowing

Ambiguous spacing can mislead. If two letters' morse patterns concatenate naturally into a third letter (e.g. .. + .- could look like ...-), a missing gap corrupts the decode. Always match the spacing you see in the original.
No support for non-ITU variants. American morse, Japanese Wabun code, and Cyrillic morse aren't in our table. For those, use a specialist tool.
Prosigns decode as their constituent letters. ...---... with no gaps reads as SOS, same as ... --- .... If you need the prosign name, see SOS.

Decoding morse you can see, not hear

Most people arrive here not from a radio but from something they can look at — a bracelet, a tattoo, an engraving, a line of dots and dashes in a book or a game. Decoding written morse is a slightly different job from decoding it by ear: instead of judging duration, you judge shape and spacing. Round beads and short marks are dots; long bars and stretched marks are dashes; the trick is reading the gaps. Note the tight gaps inside a letter, the wider gaps between letters, and the widest gaps (often a charm or a slash) between words — transcribe those into dots, dashes, single spaces and slashes, and paste the lot above to get the English back.

Why the spaces matter more than the dots

The single most common decoding failure isn't a misread dot — it's missing gaps. A run of pulses with no spacing is genuinely ambiguous: six dots ...... could be EEEEEE (six E's), III, or HI, depending entirely on where the letter breaks fall. Morse relies on three gap lengths to stay readable — one unit between elements, three between letters, seven between words — and lose that spacing and even a perfect string of dots and dashes can't be resolved. If a decode comes out as gibberish, the fix is almost always to re-insert the letter and word gaps where you think they belong, not to re-check the dots.