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Most morse code sites hand you a chart of dots and dashes and wish you luck. That teaches you to read morse, which is a skill you will then spend a year unlearning. This one starts with sound on the first screen and never shows you a dot unless you ask for it.
Each group is one character, and it lights up as you hear it. Change the speed and listen again — the gulf between 5 and 28 words a minute is the whole reason this site generates its audio instead of shipping recordings.
Morse code represents each letter, number and punctuation mark as a pattern of short and long signals — dits and dahs, or dots and dashes if you are reading rather than listening. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail worked it out in the 1830s and 40s, and Vail reportedly chose the short codes for the common letters by counting the type in a printer's case. That is why E is a single dit and Q is four elements long: the code was optimised for written English before anybody had a word for that.
It is still in daily use. Commercial and maritime morse ended in 1999, when the satellite-based GMDSS replaced the 500 kHz distress watch, but amateur radio operators send far more CW today than most people expect. There is a good reason: a morse signal occupies a tiny slice of spectrum and carries an enormous distance for the power. A few watts and a wire will cross an ocean on a night when a voice transmission will not get out of the county. Aviation beacons still identify themselves in morse round the clock, and the international beacon network on 14.100 MHz never stops.
And it is a genuinely satisfying thing to be able to do. It goes in slowly and then all at once: there is a point, usually somewhere around ten words a minute, where you stop decoding individual letters and start hearing whole words, and it feels like a switch being thrown.
Eight tools that share one set of settings, so the speed and tone you are comfortable with follow you everywhere.
Forty lessons. You start with two characters at full speed and earn the next one by copying at ninety per cent. The gaps stretch to give you thinking time — the characters never slow down, so you never learn a rhythm you have to unlearn later.
Type as it plays. Every keystroke is marked the instant it lands, with a running count of right, wrong, accuracy and your longest clean run — plus a lag meter, because staying a character or two behind is the whole trick and most people fight it.
Sweep across a simulated 40 metres and the signals slide up and down in pitch as you pass them, exactly as they do on a real receiver. Narrow the filter, pull one station out of four, and log the callsigns you manage to copy.
Hold the space bar and it decodes what you actually sent. Then it measures your dah-to-dit ratio and all three gaps, because an unreadable fist is nearly always a spacing problem and you cannot hear your own spacing.
A sixty-second character blitz, a speed ladder that climbs until you fall off, a word-recognition rush, and a pile-up with several stations calling at once. All of them feed the same statistics as the lessons.
A heatmap of every character you have met, the pairs you confuse with each other, your speed over time, and a streak. Click any weak character to drill it immediately.
Text to morse and back, with a picture of the keying drawn to scale. Save any exercise as a real .wav file at your own speed and pitch, for the car or a run.
Point it at your microphone, an audio file, or a public web receiver in another tab, and it reads the morse back as text — finding the pitch and following the sender's speed on its own.
Click any character to hear it at the speed you picked above. This is a reference, not a study aid — see how to learn it for why memorising this table is the slow road.
Five elements each, and beautifully regular: 1 is one dit then four dahs, and each number up to 5 trades one more dah for a dit, after which the pattern runs back the other way to 0.
Marks are long, rare, and the reason a message suddenly stops making sense. The full stop, comma, question mark and slash are worth knowing; the rest you can look up.
There is a complete, hearable chart inside — with rhythm mnemonics for every letter, the code drawn as a binary tree, the timing explained, and a printable sheet: open the full morse code chart.
Nearly everybody who gives up does so for one of four reasons, and all four are avoidable.
If you memorise the chart you build a translation step — hear the beeps, picture the dots, look up the letter. It works at five words a minute and becomes a hard ceiling at ten. Learn each character as a single sound with a rhythm, the way you know a word rather than spelling it out.
Farnsworth timing sends each character at 20 wpm from your very first lesson and stretches the silence between them instead. You hear the real rhythm from minute one; only your thinking time shrinks as you improve. Slowing the characters down teaches a rhythm you then have to unlearn.
This is a motor skill and it consolidates overnight, not in one long sitting. Six short sessions in a week beat one long Sunday, and it is not close. The streak counter on the progress page exists for exactly this reason.
The commonest way to fail is to stop and puzzle over the character you missed — and miss the next four while you do it. Drop it and take what comes. Sitting a character or two behind the sending is not lag, it is head copy, and it is where the recognition happens.
| Stage | Typical effort | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Your first few characters | A day or two | Surprisingly easy, and quite addictive. |
| All 26 letters | 3–6 weeks at 15 min a day | Slow going in the middle. The confusable pairs — U and V, S and H, B and D — are where the time goes. |
| The full character set | 6–10 weeks | Numbers and punctuation come faster than the letters did. |
| Copying real words | 2–4 months | The switch flips. You stop spelling and start hearing. |
| Holding a conversation at 15 wpm | 6–12 months | Depends almost entirely on how regular you were. |
Those figures assume short, frequent practice. They are not a promise — people vary enormously — but the pattern is consistent: almost nobody fails at morse for lack of aptitude. They fail because they practise for three hours one weekend and then not again for a fortnight.
Every exercise here is generated as you listen, by your browser, from text. There is not a single MP3 anywhere in it. That is a deliberate choice and it is the most important one in the build.
A recorded file has one speed and one pitch baked into it forever. But the single thing a learner needs to change — every week, sometimes every ten minutes — is the speed. A library of recordings would be tens of megabytes, slow to load, and the wrong speed for almost everybody who played it. Generating the audio instead means a thousand exercises cost nothing to ship, every one plays at whatever speed and tone suit you today, and you can still download any of them as a real .wav when you want it on your phone.
The timing is not approximated either. A dit is one unit, a dah is three, the gap inside a character is one, between characters three, and between words seven — and the word PARIS is exactly fifty units, which is what "words per minute" actually means. Every speed on this site comes from that one piece of arithmetic, so 20 wpm here is 20 wpm on any other piece of morse equipment you will ever meet.
Morse has a vocabulary of its own, and most of it is never explained to beginners.
To copy the full character set slowly, six to ten weeks of fifteen minutes a day. To hold a conversation at around 15 words a minute, six months to a year, depending almost entirely on how regular you are. Almost nobody fails at morse because they lack the aptitude; they fail because they practise for three hours one weekend and then not again for a fortnight.
No, and you should not. Learning the visual pattern builds a translation step — hear the sound, picture the dots, look up the letter — that becomes a hard ceiling at around 10 words a minute. The chart on this site exists to look things up and to print, not to memorise.
Sending the characters at high speed while leaving longer gaps between them. It matters because the thing you are learning is the rhythm of each character as one sound. Slow it down and a letter stops being a sound and becomes a sequence of separate beeps you have to count, which is a different skill, easier to learn, and useless.
Characters at 20 words a minute, overall speed at 5. That feels absurdly slow between letters and it is meant to. Push the overall speed up a word a minute at a time and leave the character speed alone until you are past 18 or so.
Commercially, no. Maritime services stopped keeping watch on 500 kHz in 1999 when the satellite-based GMDSS took over. What is very much alive is amateur radio, where CW remains the most efficient mode there is — a few watts and a wire will cross an ocean when voice will not get out of the county. Aviation beacons also still identify themselves in morse, endlessly, and the international beacon network on 14.100 MHz runs day and night.
No — a web page cannot receive radio, and any site claiming otherwise is showing you a recording. The tuner here is a simulator, though an honest one: signals separate by pitch as you tune past them, just as they do on a real receiver. For genuinely live signals, open one of the public web receivers linked inside and let the built-in decoder listen to it.
Yes, entirely, and there is no account to create. The site is paid for by the advertising you can see on it. Nothing is held back behind a payment, there is no trial that expires, and no feature is disabled until you sign up.
Yes, including the typing trainer and the key. Headphones make an enormous difference on any device — a phone speaker at 600 Hz in a room with other people in it is doing you no favours.
In your browser, and nowhere else. There is no account, no server, and nothing is uploaded. The flip side is that clearing your site data will clear your streak too, so there is an export button on the progress page.
Morse code is the code itself — the patterns of dits and dahs. CW, short for continuous wave, is the radio mode used to send it: a carrier switched on and off. In practice operators use the two words interchangeably, and "CW" is what you will hear on the air.
Not to learn it. You need a licence to transmit, but listening and practising need nothing at all. The international treaty requirement to demonstrate morse proficiency was dropped in 2003, and Ireland, the United Kingdom and most other countries followed — which is why so many people learn it now purely because they want to rather than because an examiner is waiting.
Nothing. It was chosen in 1906 because it is unmistakable and easy to send under pressure, not as an abbreviation. "Save Our Souls" was invented afterwards. It is sent as one continuous run with no gaps between the letters.
Lesson one is two characters and takes a minute.
Start the course