The Morse code alphabet
All 26 letters, 10 digits and 18 punctuation marks, followingITU-R M.1677-1, the international standard. Click any character to hear it.
Letters
Numbers
Punctuation
Why the codes are what they are
The alphabet is not arbitrary. Morse is a prefix tree: from a starting point, a dot branches one way and a dash the other, and every character sits where its own sequence lands. E is one dot because E is the most common letter in English, and the shortest codes went to the letters that would be sent most often.
The digits give this away most clearly. 1 is one dot then four dashes, 2 is two dots then three dashes, and so on until 5 is five dots — then the pattern reverses back out to 0, which is five dashes. It is a rule you can derive rather than a table you have to memorise.
SEE THE TREECommon questions
How many characters are in the Morse code alphabet?
International Morse code covers 26 letters, 10 digits and around 18 punctuation and procedural characters, defined in ITU-R M.1677-1. Letters run from one element (E and T) to four; digits are all exactly five elements long; punctuation runs from five to seven.
Why is E just one dot?
Because E is the most common letter in English. Morse assigned the shortest codes to the most frequent letters, which is a form of frequency encoding — the same principle behind modern compression. Q and Z are long precisely because they are rare.
Is there a Morse code for lowercase letters?
No. Morse has no case at all. It also has no way to indicate a paragraph or a new line beyond the prosign BT. Anything sent in Morse arrives as uppercase by convention, not because it was sent that way.
What is the difference between American and International Morse?
American Morse, the original, used variable-length internal gaps inside some characters. Those gaps were readable on a landline sounder but not over radio, where fading and interference blur them. International Morse replaced it worldwide and is what every modern reference means by "Morse code".