Morse Code Decoder: Morse back into plain text

Text

Morse code

Speed18 WPM Tone600 Hz Letter spacing×1

Audio, flash, and vibration playback WAV download, no signup Full ITU character set Works offline

Dots and dashes in, words out

A decoder that reads messy Morse honestly

Paste any Morse code into the right-hand panel above, dots and dashes with spaces between letters and a slash between words, and the plain text appears on the left as you type. The decoder tolerates the mess real Morse arrives in: extra spaces, line breaks, and uneven gaps. What it will not do is guess. Any pattern that matches no letter, digit, symbol, or prosign is flagged for you to check, because a decoder that silently invents characters is worse than no decoder at all. Press Play to hear what you pasted, with each element highlighted as it sounds.

Input format

How to write Morse so it decodes correctly

The decoder accepts standard notation. Most decoding failures come from the separators, not the codes.
You want	Type this	Example
A dit	. (period)	.
A dah	- (hyphen)	-
Next letter	one space	.... ..
Next word	/ (slash)	.... .. / - .... . .-. .
Line break	new line (treated as a word break)	—

No spaces between letters

Morse without letter gaps is genuinely ambiguous: ...---... could be SOS, or EEETTTEEE, or dozens of other readings. No decoder can resolve it.

Add a space after each letter's code. If you copied run-together Morse, re-space it from the charts.

Underscores instead of hyphens

Some sources write dahs as underscores ( _ ), which the standard notation does not use, so ._ will not match A.

Replace underscores with hyphens before pasting, or retype using - for every dah.

Words run together

Without word separators the decoder returns one long string of letters, technically correct and hard to read.

Put a slash between words. The translator on the main page produces this format automatically.

Pick your tool

Decoder or translator: which page do you need?

This page is the decoder, built for one direction: Morse in, plain text out, with the input-format guidance above for when pasted code misbehaves. If you also want to encode text into Morse, generate audio, and browse the complete character charts, use the full translator. And once your Morse decodes into letters that still read like a riddle, CQ, 73, QTH, the interpreter page covers what those abbreviations and Q-codes actually mean, plus the by-ear copying workflow.

FAQ

Morse code decoder questions, answered

How do I decode Morse code to text?

Paste the Morse into the right-hand panel above using dots and dashes, with a space between letters and a slash between words. The plain text appears instantly on the left. Anything that matches no known pattern is flagged rather than guessed, so you can spot transcription errors.

Why will my Morse code not decode?

Almost always the separators: missing spaces between letters make the code ambiguous, underscores used as dahs do not match standard notation, and missing slashes run words together. The input format table above covers all three, with fixes.

Can the decoder read prosigns like SOS?

Written with letter spacing, ... --- ... decodes as SOS. The run-together distress prosign, ...---... as one continuous pattern, is intentionally flagged instead, because it is a single procedural signal rather than three letters. The prosign table on the main page lists and plays each one correctly.

Can it decode Morse code from a sound recording?

Not directly; this decoder works on typed dots and dashes, not audio analysis. For a recording, the practical workflow is to listen at reduced speed, transcribe the dits and dahs as . and -, and paste them here. The playback button then lets you compare your transcription against the original by ear.