Morse Code Chart: Alphabet, Numbers and Punctuation

Quick answer: The chart below gives every International Morse Code character — 26 letters, 10 digits and 18 punctuation marks — with its dot-and-dash pattern, how it sounds, and how long it takes to send. Each punctuation mark is marked as either ITU standard or a common addition, because two symbols you will find on most Morse charts online are not actually in the international standard. Click any character to hear it.

Alphabets

Numbers

Punctuation

Morse Code Alphabet: A to Z

Each letter is a pattern of one to four signals. The Units column gives the length in Morse time units, where a dot is 1, a dash is 3, and the gap inside a letter is 1. The Frequency column is how often that letter appears in written English — the two columns are related, and the next section explains why.

Why E Is One Dot and Q Is Four Signals

The assignment of patterns to letters is not arbitrary. Alfred Vail reportedly surveyed the type cases at a Morristown newspaper to find out which letters printers used most, then gave the most common letters the shortest codes.

It worked. Running the correlation between English letter frequency and Morse code length across all 26 letters gives r = −0.82 — a strong negative relationship. Common letters are short; rare letters are long.

• The eight most common English letters average 5 units each
• The eight rarest average 10.8 units — more than twice as long
• E, the most common letter at 12.7%, is a single dot: 1 unit
• Q, at 0.10%, is --.-: 13 units, thirteen times longer

This is why Morse remains efficient at low speeds. A message in ordinary English is materially shorter to send than the same number of characters drawn at random from the alphabet.

The fit is not perfect. O is the fourth most common letter at 7.51% but takes 11 units, because --- is three dashes. If the code were optimized purely for frequency, O and one of the shorter patterns would swap.

The chart is a binary tree

There is a structure underneath the chart that makes it much easier to learn than 26 separate patterns.

Start at nothing. A dot takes you to E; a dash takes you to T. From E, another dot gives I and a dash gives A. From T, a dot gives N and a dash gives M. Every letter is reached by a sequence of left-or-right choices.

That produces an exact distribution:

Two, four, eight, sixteen. The pattern space is filled exactly, with no gaps, until the four-signal level — where 12 letters use 12 of the 16 available slots.

The remaining four are not empty. They hold the accented characters: ..-- is Ü, .-.- is Ä, ---. is Ö, and ---- is CH as used in German. The code was designed for European languages, and those four slots are why.

Morse Code Numbers: 0 to 9

Digits are the most regular part of the code. Every one is exactly five signals, and they follow a visible progression: 1 is one dot then four dashes, 2 is two dots then three dashes, and so on to 5 (five dots) before reversing.

All digits are 5 signals, but they are not all the same length in time, because dashes take three times as long as dots. 5 (.....) is 9 units. 0 (-----) is 19 units — more than twice as long to send.

Because digits are slow, operators abbreviate them in practice. In contest and signal-report traffic you will hear T for zero and N for nine, so a report of 599 is sent as 5NN. These cut numbers are convention, not standard, and they are not on this chart for that reason.

Which Characters Are Official

Morse punctuation is where charts stop agreeing with each other, and the reason is simple: not every symbol in circulation is in the standard.

The international standard is ITU-R Recommendation M.1677-1, published by the International Telecommunication Union. It defines the character set used in amateur radio and international communication. Anything outside it is convention — often widely followed convention, but convention.

The two that surprise people

The exclamation mark is not in the standard. -.-.-- is what you will find on nearly every Morse chart online, and every software implementation supports it, but it is an American convention that was never adopted into M.1677-1. Sending it to an international contact is not wrong so much as unofficial.

The semicolon is not either. -.-.-. is in the same position. Note also that it is one dot away from the exclamation mark, which is a good argument for avoiding both on a weak signal.

The parenthesis question

ITU M.1677-1 defines one symbol for parentheses — -.--.-, used for both opening and closing. The separate opening bracket -.--. that most charts list is a later convention, and it collides with the prosign <KN>, which is the same pattern and means “go ahead, named station only.”

This kind of collision is common in the non-standard additions. The ampersand .-... is identical to the prosign <AS> meaning “wait.” Context resolves it in practice, but it is a reason the standard set stayed small.

How to Read the Chart

Find the character in the left column and read its pattern across. .- for A means one short signal followed by one long signal.

The critical distinction: a dash is longer than a dot, not louder. Both are the same tone at the same volume. The only difference is duration — three units against one. Beginners sometimes try to send Morse by pressing a key harder for dashes, which does nothing; the difference is entirely in how long the key stays down.

The “Sounds like” column exists because that is how the code is actually used. Operators say di and dah, not “dot” and “dash,” and A is spoken as “di-dah.” Reading the chart aloud that way, rather than as visual symbols, is the single fastest thing you can do to learn it — because at any real operating speed there is no time to picture dots.

Spacing

The gaps carry meaning and are part of the code, not the absence of it:

Without the three-unit letter gap, ... - could be S then T, or it could be the single character V (...-). Timing is what separates them. Full detail, including the WPM formula, is on Morse code timing rules.

Why You Sometimes See a Different Chart

If you have found a Morse chart that disagrees with this one, it is probably American Morse — and this is the point most Morse pages get wrong, including the earlier version of this one.

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail did not invent the code on this page. They developed American Morse, also called Railroad Morse, in the 1830s and 1840s for use on landline telegraph circuits in the United States.

The code on this page is International Morse, a later revision. Friedrich Gerke reworked the American code in 1848 for use on German telegraph lines, removing the features that did not survive radio well, and the result was adopted as the international standard at the International Telegraph Convention in Paris in 1865.

American Morse used internal spacing inside characters and more than one dash length, which worked on a wired circuit where the sound was crisp but failed badly over radio, where fading and noise blur exactly those distinctions. That is why International Morse replaced it, and why every chart you actually need is the international one.

Printing and Offline Use

The PDF above is the same character set as this page, formatted for a single sheet of A4 or US Letter. It is intended for the situations where a browser is not available — a go-bag, a radio shack wall, a classroom handout.

One caution about learning from a printed chart: it is a reference, not a teaching tool. Learners who memorize the visual patterns have to unlearn that habit later, because at 20 words per minute a character lasts under half a second and there is no time to picture anything. Use the chart to check yourself, and the audio to learn. The practice trainer handles the audio side.

How This Chart Is Verified

Every code on this page was generated directly from the ITU-R Recommendation M.1677-1 character table and checked programmatically rather than transcribed by hand. Unit counts are calculated from the timing standard, not estimated. Letter frequencies are standard English corpus figures, and the correlation of −0.82 was computed across all 26 letters.

Where a character is not in M.1677-1, the Status column says so rather than presenting it as standard. We would rather the chart be honest about its edges than look more complete than it is.

Changelog

• August 2026 — Rebuilt. Added six missing punctuation marks and an ITU status column. Corrected the claim that Morse and Vail created International Morse. Corrected “a dash is a stronger signal” to “longer.” Removed the incorrect claim that Morse is used for secure military messaging. Added unit counts, letter frequencies and the binary tree structure. Merged in the alphabet, numbers and punctuation pages.
• April 2026 — Previous version published.

Last reviewed: August 2026.

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