Morse Code Light Translator

Type any message and this tool converts it into flashing Morse code light signals you can watch on screen. It’s free, runs in your browser, and needs no account or install.

⚠️ Photosensitivity warning. This tool produces rapid flashing light. Above roughly 7 words per minute, a run of dots flashes faster than three times per second — the threshold at which flashing content is considered a seizure risk. If you have photosensitive epilepsy or any light sensitivity, keep the speed at 5 WPM or below, or don’t use it. The section on flash rate and safety explains the numbers.

What a Morse code light translator does

A Morse code light translator turns typed text into a sequence of short and long flashes following the International Morse code standard (ITU-R M.1677-1). A dot is a short flash. A dash is a flash three times as long. The gaps between flashes carry as much meaning as the flashes themselves.

One unit in milliseconds is 1200 divided by your speed in words per minute. At 10 WPM a unit is 120 ms; at 20 WPM it’s 60 ms. That single formula governs everything else on this page.

Flash rate and safety: the part most tools skip

The accessibility standard for flashing content (WCAG 2.3.1) sets the limit at three flashes in any one-second period. Morse code crosses that line at surprisingly low speeds, and it’s worth seeing the arithmetic rather than taking a vague warning on trust.

A dot is one unit lit and one unit dark, so a run of consecutive dots — as in H (....) or 5 (.....) — flashes at WPM divided by 2.4 times per second:

Three things follow. If you are photosensitive, drag the speed slider down to 5 before pressing Play — the tool starts at 15. The risk sits in the dot-heavy characters like H (....), S (...) and 5 (.....), not in the message as a whole, so a message can be well within limits until one particular letter arrives. And if you’re building Morse flashing into anything public-facing yourself, the same standard applies to you, which is part of why signal lamps in real service are worked far slower than radio Morse.

Why light signaling runs slower than sound

Experienced radio operators copy Morse by ear at 20–30 words per minute. Signal lamp work happens far below that, and the reason isn’t tradition — it’s that visual recognition of short events is simply slower than auditory recognition. Your ear resolves a 60 ms tone cleanly. Your eye, watching a lamp across water in daylight, does not.

Screens make this worse. An LCD panel has a physical response time and a fixed refresh rate, so a 60 ms flash gets smeared at the edges rather than snapping on and off the way a real lamp does. At high speeds a screen-based dot stops being a crisp signal and becomes a flicker. If you’re using this tool to build a skill you’ll later use with an actual light source, practice slow. What you learn at 5–8 WPM transfers. What you learn at 20 WPM on a laptop screen mostly doesn’t.

How to use this tool

There are two ways in, chosen with the toggle at the top of the input panel.

Text to Morse is the usual one. Type an ordinary message and the Morse appears in the panel below as you type, so you can read the pattern before watching it flash. Morse to Light goes the other way: paste dots and dashes you already have and watch them play. Use . for a dot, - for a dash, a space between letters, and / between words — so HELP ME is .... . .-.. .--. / -- .

1. Pick your mode and enter your message, or tap one of the quick signals below the input.
2. Drag the speed slider. It starts at 15 WPM; set it to 5 if you’re learning, and see the safety table above if you’re photosensitive.
3. Press Play Signal. The orb flashes, and the Dot and Dash indicators light up to show which element is transmitting.
4. Press Stop to end early, or Play Signal again to repeat. Repetition is the whole method.

Quick signals

Ten preset messages sit under the input box for the cases people actually need in a hurry: SOS, MAYDAY, HELP, HELP ME, YES, NO, STOP, GO, WAIT, and SAFE. Tapping one loads it straight into the input. These are worth practicing until you can send them without the tool — a distress signal you can only produce with a browser open isn’t much of a distress signal.

Sound

Audio plays alongside the flashing by default, and the Sound button toggles it off. Leave it on if you’re learning, because hearing and seeing the same pattern together builds recognition faster than either alone. Turn it off if you specifically want the silent visual signal — which is the whole point in a quiet room, or if you’re deaf or hard of hearing and the audio is just noise to everyone else.

Sending SOS with a flashlight

SOS is ...---... — three short flashes, three long flashes, three short flashes. It is sent as one unbroken run, with no letter gaps inside it. That’s what makes it recognizable: it has a shape no ordinary word produces.

To send it with a physical light:

1. Three quick flashes, evenly spaced.
2. Three long flashes, each about three times the length of the short ones.
3. Three quick flashes again.
4. Pause for several seconds, then repeat. The pause matters — it tells an observer they’re seeing a repeating distress signal rather than random light.

SOS doesn’t stand for anything. It isn’t an abbreviation of “save our souls” or anything else; the letters were chosen for the pattern. Germany adopted it in national regulations in 1905, the 1906 International Radiotelegraphic Convention in Berlin made it the international standard, and it took effect worldwide on 1 July 1908. Full background on the SOS in Morse Code page.

A signal mirror is the other light-based option, and a better one in daylight. The USAF Search and Rescue Survival Training Manual (AF 64-4) puts a properly aimed military-spec mirror flash at up to 10 miles visible to the naked eye in full sunlight. The qualifier is doing real work in that sentence: aimed. An unaimed mirror waved around has a fraction of that range. There are documented rescues where a mirror was the deciding factor, including cases where survivors flashed Morse rather than a steady light.

When light beats sound

The honest counterpoint: light needs line of sight and it needs darkness or direct sun. Fog, foliage, a hill, or overcast midday all defeat it, and in every one of those cases sound is the better choice. Light isn’t a superior channel — it’s a different one, with a different failure mode.

Morse code alphabet reference

On this page, read . as a short flash and - as a long one. Notation below is standard ITU form, the same as used across the rest of this site, so you can copy it into any other tool without translating it first.

The full reference with punctuation and prosigns is on the Morse Code Alphabet page.

Where light-based Morse is actually used

Naval signaling. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard still use signal lamps to communicate in Morse. This is the clearest surviving operational use of light-flashed Morse anywhere, and it persists for a specific reason: under emissions control, a directional lamp says nothing to anyone who isn’t in its beam.

Military signals training. Morse instruction has consolidated rather than disappeared. The Army phased out its own Morse teaching between 2012 and 2015, with training moving to the 316th Training Squadron at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, and the Navy runs Morse as part of cryptologic technician training in its information warfare community.

A correction worth making, because it circulates widely: the well-known 2015 story about the U.S. Navy reviving an old skill to guard against GPS jamming and cyberattack is about celestial navigation, not Morse code. The Naval Academy reinstated celestial navigation instruction in 2015 for exactly that reason. Morse code training changed in the same period, but for unrelated reasons. The two get merged on a lot of Morse code websites. They shouldn’t be.

Search and rescue. Flashlights and signal mirrors are standard kit, and light signaling remains in survival curricula because it works when nothing electronic does.

Aviation and amateur radio. Both are audio rather than light, but they’re why Morse literacy persists at all — VOR and NDB beacons broadcast their identifiers in Morse, and CW remains a recognized transmission mode. See is Morse code still used today for the full picture.

Assistive communication. People with severe motor impairment use single-switch Morse input to compose text, which is a genuinely different application of the same encoding.

Using this to learn

Watching flashes is a decent way in, and a poor way to finish. Visual pattern recognition builds quickly, which makes it a good on-ramp when charts alone feel abstract. But real Morse fluency is auditory — operators hear a character as a single sound shape rather than counting elements. If you plan to go beyond curiosity, treat this tool as the first two weeks and then switch to sound.

A workable sequence: use light flashing to get comfortable with the shape of the first handful of characters, then move to the practice trainer and drill by ear. Most people recognize the full alphabet within one to two weeks of daily practice; a comfortable conversational pace at 13–15 WPM typically takes three to six months. Start with high-frequency short words — THE, AND, FOR, ARE, YOU — from the common Morse code words list rather than random letters.

Limits of this tool

• Screen only. The flashing happens on your display. Browsers have limited and inconsistent access to a phone’s LED torch, so this does not control your camera flash.
• It plays signals, it doesn’t read them. You can feed it either plain text or written Morse, but it can’t watch a video of a flashing light and tell you what it said. That’s a different problem entirely.
• Screen brightness caps the range. A phone screen is not a signaling device. For anything at distance, use an actual flashlight.
• High speeds degrade on screen. Covered above — beyond roughly 10 WPM you are watching flicker, not clean Morse.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Morse Code Tools

About this tool

MorseCode.live is built and maintained by a small independent team. Character mappings are checked against ITU-R M.1677-1. The flash-rate figures on this page are calculated from the standard unit formula (1200 divided by WPM) against the WCAG three-flashes-per-second threshold, so you can verify them yourself.

Found something wrong? Tell us — corrections go into the next release.

Version history

• v2.0 — August 2026. Complete rebuild. New two-panel interface with a dedicated signal display, a second input mode that accepts written Morse directly, ten quick-signal presets, a 5–40 WPM speed slider, and a toggle for the audio that plays alongside the flashing. Notation standardized to ITU form across the tool and this page. Documentation rewritten, including corrections to several claims about where light-based Morse is still used.
• v1.0 — April 2026. Initial release of the Morse code light translator: text-to-Morse conversion with on-screen flashing output.