What We Found Checking Every Morse Code Table

To build a translator for more than 45 languages, we parsed every national Morse table from its published source and compared it with a second, independent source. Most agree. These are the places where they do not.

Arabic ه: an error on the most-visited Morse site

English Wikipedia and Arabic Wikipedia both give the Arabic letter ه (ha) as ··−·· in Morse code, the same code as the Latin É. The Arabic table on morsecode.world, the most-visited Morse code site, gives ··−−·· instead, which in International Morse code is the question mark. With two independent sources against one, and the one being the code for a punctuation mark, morse24 uses ··−··. All 28 other Arabic letters agree across the three sources. See the Arabic Morse code page.

Croatian and Serbian: two tables, one code

Serbian Wikipedia gives a Serbian Cyrillic Morse table from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, citing the 1937 encyclopedia Свезнање. Croatian Wikipedia gives a table for the Croatian Latin letters. They match letter for letter: Č and Ч are both −·−−·, Ć and Ћ −·−··, Đ and Ђ −··−−, DŽ and Џ −−·−·, LJ and Љ ·−−−·, NJ and Њ −−·−−, Š and Ш −−−·−, Ž and Ж −−··−. The same table also differs from the Russian one for В, Ж, Ч and Ш. See Serbian Morse code.

Polish Ź and Ż: swapped between sources

Polish Wikipedia gives Ż as −−··−· and Ź as −−··−. English Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia give them the other way round (Ż −−··−, Ź −−··−·). Because the sources disagree and neither is an official standard, morse24 sends both letters as a plain Z when you choose Polish, and says so, rather than risk sending the wrong one.

Ukrainian Ї: official regulation versus scout table

Ukrainian Wikipedia shows two columns. The official regulation sends Ї the same as І (··). The table of Plast, the Ukrainian scout organisation, gives Ї its own code, ·−−−·, and English Wikipedia agrees with Plast. morse24 uses ·−−−· so that Ї can be decoded back, and notes the official variant on the Ukrainian page.

Chinese telegraph code: 418 characters differ

Chinese is sent in Morse as four-digit numbers from a telegraph codebook. Unicode's Unihan database records two codebooks: Mainland China (kMainlandTelegraph, 7,078 characters) and Taiwan (kTaiwanTelegraph, 9,024 characters). Of the 4,572 characters listed in both, 418 have a different number in each book. A message encoded with one book and decoded with the other will come out wrong for those characters. See the Chinese telegraph code lookup.

Thai ็: two sources, two codes

Thai Wikipedia and the table published by the Thai amateur radio station HS4VED agree on 65 Thai Morse signs. They disagree on one, the short-vowel mark ็ (mai tai khu): −−−·· in one, ·−−−· in the other. morse24 leaves it out rather than guess.

How we checked

Every table was parsed by script from its source, never typed by hand, and every code was verified against the exact line it came from. The full list of sources is on the sources page. If you know a published table that settles one of these conflicts, write to hello@morse24.com.

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