American Morse Code
American Morse code, also called railroad Morse, is the original code used on North American telegraph lines. It differs from International Morse. Choose it in the menu to hear the difference.
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Pause for a letter gap, pause longer for a word gap. On a computer the space bar works too. Timing follows the speed in Settings.
Decode Morse from sound or a picture
Play a Morse tone near the microphone, or open a recording. The decoder finds the pitch and the speed by itself and works best on a clean tone between 300 and 1500 Hz. An image works when the dots and dashes are solid shapes on a plain background, like a screenshot or a printed card. Nothing is uploaded: everything is processed on your device.
Set overall speed lower than letter speed for Farnsworth timing: letters stay quick, the gaps get longer. This is how most people learn.
Morse code chart
Tap any character to hear it.
Letters, numbers and punctuation
Procedural signals (prosigns)
Sent as one signal with no gap between the letters. Type them in angle brackets, like <SK>.
How it differs
American Morse has two lengths of dash, a long dash for L and an even longer one for zero, and a longer gap inside some letters: C, O, R, Y, Z and & are made of separated dots. O, for example, is two dots with a gap (· ·), where International Morse uses three dashes.
Where it was used
The code was developed by Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse and first used in 1844. It stayed in use on North American landlines and railroads long after the rest of the world adopted International Morse; U.S. railroads had largely phased out Morse telegraphy by the mid-1950s.
Timing
There is no single published timing standard for American Morse. The translator plays a dot as 1 unit, a dash as 2, the long dash as 4 and the zero as 5, with a 2-unit gap inside the spaced letters.
Sources
English Wikipedia and morsecode.world agree on all 36 letters and numbers.
Tables checked against their published sources on 25 September 2026.
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