Translate text and morse

Paste either one. The direction is detected from what you type, and the result plays at whatever speed you set.

The direction is detected, not chosen

Morse is only dots, dashes, spaces and slashes, so anything made of those is decoded and anything else is encoded. You can force it either way, but you almost never need to — and having to pick a direction before pasting is the friction that makes most translators annoying.

Words are separated by a slash

Within a word, letters are separated by a space; between words, by a slash. That convention exists because a word gap in real morse is a silence seven units long, and writing it as a wider space is ambiguous the moment anything reformats the text.

Questions

Why do some characters come back missing?

Because morse has no code for them. There is no standard morse for an accented letter, a curly apostrophe or an emoji, so anything without a code cannot be sent. This site lists exactly what it had to drop rather than quietly leaving it out, which is what most translators do.

How fast is 20 words per minute?

A dit is 1200 divided by the speed in words per minute, so at 20 WPM a dit is 60 milliseconds and a dah is 180. The standard word is PARIS because it is exactly 50 units long, which is what makes words per minute a precise measure of morse rather than an approximate one.

What are prosigns?

Procedural signals: two or three letters run together as one symbol with no gap between them, written like <SK> for end of contact or <BT> for a pause. Some share a code with a punctuation mark — <BT> and the equals sign are both -...- — and only context tells them apart.