MORSE CODE CHART

How to read this chart

Each row pairs a character with its code, written here as • for a dot and ▬ for a dash. Read it left to right in the order you would send it: C is dah-di-dah-dit, not the other way round. The chart is a lookup table and nothing more — it will get you unstuck on a character you have forgotten, but it is a poor way to learn, because anything you learn by eye has to be unlearned before you can copy by ear. Use it the way an operator uses a logbook: open on the desk, glanced at, not studied.

Notice that the shortest codes belong to the most common letters. E is a single dot, T a single dash, and A, I, M and N take two elements apiece. That is not an accident: Alfred Vail is generally credited with counting the type in a Morristown newspaper's job cases to find out which letters printers used most, and assigning the cheapest codes to those. The result is a code that is roughly optimal for English text, which is why a message in Morse is shorter than the same message in a fixed-length code such as Baudot.

The timing rules

A character is a pattern of durations, not a picture. Everything derives from one unit of time: a dot lasts one unit, a dash three, the gap between the elements inside a character one, the gap between characters three, and the gap between words seven. Sending speed is quoted in words per minute against the reference word PARIS, which measures exactly 50 units including the word space, so a unit is 1200 / WPM milliseconds. Beginners almost always fail on the gaps rather than the elements — three units between characters feels like an eternity when you are sending, and anything shorter turns HE INT into a single unreadable blur at the far end.

Prosigns break the gap rule deliberately. They are two or more letters sent with no gap between them, so they arrive as one long character: AR is di-dah-di-dah-dit in a single breath, and if you leave three units in the middle it is heard as the letters A and R. That run-together trick is also why several prosigns share a code with a punctuation mark — AR is the plus sign, BT the equals sign, AS the ampersand, KN the open bracket. The dots are identical; only where it appears in the traffic tells you which one is meant.

Punctuation is sent sparingly on the air. A period costs six elements and a comma six more, so operators drop most of it and use the ones that carry real information: the slash in a callsign, the equals sign between the parts of a message, and the question mark that turns a Q code into a question. For what those Q codes mean, see the Q code list; to hear any of these characters keyed at a speed you choose, paste them into the translator.