Morse code chart

Printing it well

• One page, either paper size. The chart is laid out to fit a single A4 or US Letter sheet at 100% scale. If your browser shrinks it, set margins to “default” and scale to 100% rather than “fit to page”.
• Save ink. Choose your browser's light theme before printing; the print stylesheet already drops the page background and prints the table on white.
• Save as PDF. The same button works — pick “Save as PDF” as the destination instead of a printer.
• Laminate or fold. For a pocket version, print the one-page cheat sheet instead; it is trimmed down to the essentials.

What this chart covers

The letters, digits and most of the punctuation here are International Morse code as defined in Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1, the standard that also fixes the timing: a dash is three dots long, the gap inside a character is one dot, between letters three, and between words seven.

A few symbols in the punctuation block — the exclamation mark, ampersand, semicolon, underscore and dollar sign — are not in that standard. They are widely used extensions that most software understands, but an operator on the air may not. The punctuation page marks which is which and explains what the standard says about each sign.

Numbers longer than one digit have no code of their own: send each digit in turn with the normal letter gap. The numbers page has the full 10–100 table plus the rules for fractions, percentages and ordinals.

How to actually learn it

A chart is a reference, not a study method. Reading Morse by eye — counting dots and dashes — is a habit that becomes hard to unlearn once you move to sound, because at 20 words per minute a letter lasts well under a second and there is no time to count anything.

• Use the chart to look things up and to check yourself, not to memorise the table row by row.
• Learn each letter as a rhythm instead: the Koch trainer plays characters at full speed from the start, which is what trains recognition.
• Type a word into the translator and play it back to hear what the chart's dots and dashes actually sound like.
• Watch out for the mirror pairs — A and N, D and U, G and W — where the dots and dashes are simply swapped. They are the most common mix-ups when copying by ear.