Morse Code Alphabet A to Z: Letters, Numbers and Chart

A Morse code chart is read in time, not in ink: a dot lasts one unit, a dash lasts three, and the silences between them are part of the code. The unit itself has no fixed length. It is set by the sending speed, so at 20 words per minute a dot is 60 milliseconds and at 14 WPM it stretches to about 86 milliseconds.

The gaps are what separate letters from strings of letters. Dot, short pause, dash is A; dot, long pause, dash is the two letters E and T. When you write Morse by hand, put one space between letters and a slash between words so the reader can keep those gaps straight.

Every Morse code letter uses between one and four signals, and sorting the alphabet by that count is the quickest way to see its shape. Two letters need a single signal, four need two, eight need three and the remaining twelve need four.

Several pairs are reversed or inverted versions of each other, which is where most mix-ups happen: A (.-) and N (-.), D (-..) and U (..-), G (--.) and W (.--) are reversed; K (-.-) and R (.-.) swap dots for dashes. Each letter above links to its own page, where you can hear it, flash it and compare it with the patterns it is confused with.

The international table also defines punctuation, and the six below cover almost everything that appears in ordinary messages. Use the Punctuation filter above to play all 18 patterns the chart supports.

Thirteen of the 18 patterns come from ITU-R M.1677-1. The exclamation mark, ampersand, semicolon, underscore and dollar sign are common extensions used by amateur operators and by most translators, including this one. The same standard defines procedure signals such as the error sign (eight dots), understood (...-.) and end of work (...-.-); those are explained on the signal-meaning page.

A printable Morse code alphabet chart is in the download grid below, in eight versions, so you can pick the one that fits where it will live. The Morse code alphabet chart PDF comes in Letter and A4 layouts, each listing all 54 characters with their codes on one page. The PNG charts are 2,400 pixels wide, in color or black and white, for classroom walls and screens, and the numbers-only chart isolates the 10 digits.

Three smaller formats exist for carrying the alphabet with you: a phone wallpaper sized for a lock screen, a wallet card and a kids practice sheet with blank lines beside each letter. The full-size charts and the practice sheet carry the timing rule along the footer, dot 1, dash 3, letter gap 3, word gap 7, so the chart and the rhythm stay together. If you want a single word rather than the whole alphabet, the picture translator turns any phrase into a Morse code image you can save.

A Morse code decoding tree reads a pattern one signal at a time instead of looking it up as a whole, which is how the pattern is actually received. The interactive tree below walks the same branches.

The tree also explains why code order differs from alphabetical order on an operator's reference sheet: letters are listed level by level as the tree reaches them: E, T, then I, A, N, M, then S, U, R, W, D, K, G, O, and so on.

E is one dot because the people who designed the alphabet matched each code's length to how often the letter appears in English. Alfred Vail, working with Samuel Morse in the late 1830s, estimated letter frequency by counting the movable type in a Morristown, New Jersey newspaper office, then gave the commonest letters the shortest patterns. E and T, the two most frequent letters, got a single signal each.

That original code, now called American Morse, went into service on the telegraph in 1844. Friedrich Gerke simplified it in 1848 so that it used only dots and dashes, and the International Telegraph Convention in Paris adopted a revised version on 17 May 1865, keeping most of Gerke's letters and redesigning all the digits. The International Telecommunication Union still maintains that alphabet as Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1, which is the table every tool on this site is generated from.

The chart above is the international alphabet, used for radio and modern reference charts; American Morse was chiefly used on North American landline telegraphs. The two systems share many letters, but 11 letters and 9 of the 10 digits differ, and American Morse uses internal spaces and extra-long dashes that the international code dropped.

If you see a chart where C is two dots, a space and a dot, you are looking at the older landline code. The telegraph page on this site lets you key messages in either system and hear the difference on a virtual sounder.

Learning the Morse code alphabet goes faster by ear than by eye, and this page is built around that: every character here plays as sound and light.

Ten minutes a day is enough for the alphabet. The learning plan on this site schedules the rest: the Koch order, Farnsworth timing, the timed test and the tapper.