Morse Code Shorthand: Abbreviations, Q-Codes and Prosigns

The four kinds of Morse code shorthand

Morse code shorthand falls into four groups that look alike on paper and behave differently on the air: abbreviations shorten words, prosigns steer the contact, Q-codes pack a whole sentence into three letters, and number codes stand for stock phrases.

The spacing column is the one that matters. A prosign and an abbreviation can use the same letters, and only the missing gap tells them apart: SK run together ends a contact, while S K sent as two letters is the abbreviation for silent key, an operator who has died.

Number codes keep their digits spaced, so 73 is sent as 7 then 3. The history and reply etiquette for 73 and 88 are on the Morse code meaning page.

Morse code abbreviations you will hear in almost every contact

Most Morse code abbreviations are clipped English words, and a short set of them carries the bulk of a casual contact: how you call, how you say thanks, how you name the people and how you describe conditions. These are the ones to recognize before anything else.

Two habits make these easier to read. Contest operators send 5NN instead of 599, substituting N for 9 to save dashes, and contest operators send T for a zero in a clearly numeric group. Both are cut numbers, not errors, and the full table lists them under calling and reports.

Q codes: how to read the question form

Q codes are three-letter signals beginning with Q that each replace an operating sentence, and the same code is a question when a question mark follows it and a statement when nothing does. QRS? asks "shall I send slower?" while QRS tells the other station to slow down.

The British government drew up the first list for its ships and coast stations around 1909; the 1912 London International Radiotelegraph Convention adopted 45 of them, and the block QRA to QUZ still applies to every radio service under the ITU. The 37 Q-codes in the table above are the ones amateurs hear on CW; the dozen below settle most contacts.

Hams carry Q-codes onto voice as nouns and verbs: a signal has QSB, a station QSYs, an operator goes QRT for the night. On CW the codes stay literal, so a QRL? sent on a quiet frequency is a real question: a C or a QRL back means the frequency is taken, and silence means you may call.

Morse code prosigns and why spacing changes the meaning

Morse code prosigns are procedural signals that manage a contact rather than carry its content, and the operator sends each one as a single unbroken run with no letter gap inside it. Printed, a prosign wears an overline or sits in angle brackets, as in <AR>. Several share a pattern with a punctuation mark, so a translator prints + or = at the moment the operator meant "end of message" or "new section."

Prosigns predate amateur radio. Telegraphers used them on wired circuits, and the voice procedure words used today ("over," "out," "wait") were matched to them later. The table above plays each prosign as one joined sign; BK is the exception, because operators send it both joined and as two spaced letters, and the row says so.

How to read ham radio shorthand in a real contact

Ham radio shorthand follows a fixed order inside a contact, so once you know the order you can predict what each group of letters is doing even before you have decoded it. The five-line exchange below between W1AW and K2ABC is the pattern almost every casual CW contact uses.

1. Spot the call. CQ CQ DE W1AW K means "calling any station, this is W1AW, go ahead." DE always sits between the caller and its call sign.
2. Watch the reply end. W1AW DE K2ABC <KN> answers the call and, with KN, tells everyone else to stay off.
3. Read the report in three parts. GM OM UR RST 599 <BT> QTH BOSTON <BT> NAME JON K is greeting, signal report, location, name, over; each BT starts a new line.
4. Expect the same block back. FB JON TNX RST 579 QTH NYC ES NAME SAM K returns the courtesy, the report, the location and the name.
5. Recognize the close. TNX SAM 73 <SK> is thanks, best regards, end of contact; the station that sends SK is finished.

Skilled operators copy BT as a pause and start a new paragraph on it, which is why a written log of a contact looks like short lines rather than prose. Contest exchanges strip this down to call sign, 5NN and a short exchange, which is how logs reach 100 to 150 contacts an hour.

Which shorthand to learn first

Learn the shorthand in the order a contact needs it, not alphabetically: the signals that get you through a first exchange, then the vocabulary of a longer chat, then the specialist sets.

Three mistakes slow beginners down: memorizing the whole list at once, learning a code without hearing it, and mixing up the four kinds so that SK the sign-off and SK the abbreviation look the same. Play each row here before you move on, then type what you hear in the practice trainer or send it on the telegraph key until the rhythm, not the spelling, is what you recognize.

Where this list comes from

Every row in the table links to the reference it was checked against: ITU-R M.1172 for the maritime abbreviations and Q-codes, ITU-R M.1677-1 for the international Morse standard and most of the joined prosigns, and the ARRL operating guides for amateur usage such as OM, FB and the cut numbers. The 124 entries split into 62 abbreviations, 12 prosigns, 37 Q-codes and 13 calling signals and reports.

Commercial telegraph codes, the artificial code words, often five letters long, that commercial code books sold in the nineteenth century, are left out because nobody sends them on the air. Where a code has more than one meaning, the Means column gives the amateur reading first and the "heard as" example shows the context. The page shows its last review date at the bottom; a wrong row can be reported to morsebeacon@gmail.com.