Reading Morse
Morse encodes each letter as a sequence of short and long signals — dots and dashes.
E, the most common English letter, is a single dot; T is a single
dash. Rarer letters get longer sequences. That design makes it efficient to send by hand
and, incidentally, easy to decode by lookup table.
The separator problem
Morse has no inherent way to mark where one letter ends and the next begins — that is carried by timing in the original signal. Written down, people improvise: one space between letters, three spaces or a slash between words. Puzzle authors mix conventions freely. This decoder accepts slashes, pipes and runs of whitespace as word breaks, which covers nearly everything you will encounter.
Morse as a puzzle layer
In puzzle hunts and CTFs, Morse is almost never the whole challenge. It is a wrapper — the dots and dashes decode to letters that are themselves encrypted. Because this page runs the complete cipher search on the decoded output, a Caesar shift, Vigenère cipher or further encoding underneath comes out in the same run, with the full decode chain shown alongside the answer.
Common source formats
Morse turns up transcribed from audio files, from blinking lights in a video, from long
and short marks in an image, and from text where dots and dashes have been substituted with
other characters entirely. If yours uses different symbols, replace them with
. and - before pasting.
Frequently asked questions
What separators does it accept?
Single spaces between letters, and a slash, a pipe or a double space between words. Mixed conventions in the same message are handled, which matters because puzzle sources are rarely consistent.
Can it decode Morse audio or flashing lights?
No, this is a text tool. You need to transcribe the signal into dots and dashes first, then paste it here.
What if the decoded Morse is still gibberish?
Then Morse was only the outer layer. This page automatically re-runs the full cipher search on whatever the Morse decodes to, so a Caesar shift or Vigenère cipher hidden underneath is peeled off in the same pass.
Does it support numbers and punctuation?
Digits zero through nine are supported. Punctuation codes are rarer in puzzles and are skipped rather than guessed.