Common Words in Morse Code

The short answers: yes, no, and ok

These three come up more than anything else, and two of them have a wrinkle worth knowing.

YES — -.-- . ...

NO — -. ---

OK — --- -.-

The wrinkle is that experienced operators frequently do not send any of these. On the air, yes is usually sent as R (.-.), short for "roger" or "received", and agreement is often just C (-.-.). Meanwhile OK is so common in casual use that it is often shortened further.

There is also a genuine ambiguity in "no": in operating shorthand, N (-.) on its own can mean "no" or "negative", which is why a bare N in the middle of a conversation is not always the letter N. For anything you are sending to a friend rather than over a radio, spell the words out. Clarity beats tradition when the person on the other end is holding a phone.

Greetings and pleasantries

HELLO — .... . .-.. .-.. ---

HI — .... ..

HEY — .... . -.--

BYE — -... -.-- .

GOOD MORNING — --. --- --- -.. / -- --- .-. -. .. -. --.

GOOD NIGHT — --. --- --- -.. / -. .. --. .... -

THANKS — - .... .- -. -.- ...

THANK YOU — - .... .- -. -.- / -.-- --- ..-

PLEASE — .--. .-.. . .- ... .

SORRY — ... --- .-. .-. -.--

Note the / in the multi-word entries. That is the conventional way to write a word gap in text form — a longer silence, seven units instead of three. When you actually send it, nothing is transmitted during that gap at all; the slash is a notation for humans reading it on a page, not a signal.

Ham operators compress most of these ruthlessly. Hello becomes a simple call, thanks becomes TU or just TNX, and good morning rarely survives contact with a busy band. Again: if you are sending to somebody who is not a radio operator, spell it out.

Words people send to each other

This is the group that actually gets typed into translators late at night.

LOVE — .-.. --- ...- .

I LOVE YOU — .. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-

I MISS YOU — .. / -- .. ... ... / -.-- --- ..-

MISS YOU — -- .. ... ... / -.-- --- ..-

MY LOVE — -- -.-- / .-.. --- ...- .

FOREVER — ..-. --- .-. . ...- . .-.

ALWAYS — .- .-.. .-- .- -.-- ...

FRIEND — ..-. .-. .. . -. -..

HOME — .... --- -- .

FAMILY — ..-. .- -- .. .-.. -.--

I LOVE YOU is far and away the single most-requested phrase, and it is the one most often engraved, beaded, or tattooed. It is also the one where a mistake is most expensive, because a misplaced dot changes a letter and the error is permanent. If you are putting it on something physical, decode it backwards as a check — take the dots and dashes you are about to commit to and run them through the decoder to confirm they say what you think.

Urgent and practical words

HELP — .... . .-.. .--.

SOS — ... --- ...

STOP — ... - --- .--.

WAIT — .-- .- .. -

COME — -.-. --- -- .

NOW — -. --- .--

WATER — .-- .- - . .-.

FIRE — ..-. .. .-. .

SOS is the one everybody knows, and it is worth being precise about what it is. It is not an abbreviation — it does not stand for "save our souls" or anything else, despite the folklore. It was chosen in 1906 precisely because the run of three dots, three dashes, three dots is unmistakable and hard to garble, and it is properly sent as one continuous nine-mark signal with no letter gaps at all. Written as a prosign it is ...---... rather than ... --- ....

And the obvious but necessary note: SOS is a real distress signal. Flashing it from a beach or a hillside where somebody might see it and call for help is not a prank, it is a call-out. Use HELP, or anything else, when you are playing.

The abbreviations real operators use instead

If you listen to actual Morse traffic, you will hear very few complete words. Over a century of practice produced a dense shorthand, and it is worth knowing because it explains why a real transmission looks nothing like the lists above.

Common abbreviations:

• TU or TNX — thanks
• R — received, understood
• K — go ahead, over to you
• KN — go ahead, specific station only
• AR — end of message
• SK — end of contact
• CQ — calling any station
• DE — from (before a callsign)
• ES — and
• HI HI — laughter
• OM — old man, a friendly term for another operator
• 73 — best regards
• 88 — love and kisses

The numbers are the part people find most charming. 73 and 88 are survivors of a numbered code used by 19th-century commercial telegraphers, where whole phrases were compressed into two digits to save time on a paid-by-the-word wire. Almost all of that system is gone; 73 and 88 stayed because operators liked them, and they are still sent daily on the amateur bands.

There is also a set of three-letter Q-codes, each standing for a question or a statement depending on context — QTH for location, QRM for interference, QRT for stopping transmission, QSL for acknowledgement. They were designed so that operators without a shared language could still exchange essential information, which is a genuinely elegant piece of design. The ARRL publishes the full working list if you want to go deeper, and the Wikipedia entry on Morse code abbreviations covers the historical numbered codes.

For sending a message to a friend, ignore all of this and spell the words out. But if you are decoding something you picked up off the air and it is full of two-letter fragments, this is why.

Sending these words rather than reading them

Copying the dots and dashes off this page works, but it is the slowest way to use them. Two faster paths:

Paste any of the patterns above into the decoder box on this page and it will read straight back as text, which is a quick way to check that a pattern you have found elsewhere is correct before you rely on it. Or type the word itself and let the tool produce the code — then press Play to hear it, switch on the light to flash it, or send it as a link that decodes itself when the other person opens it.

That last one is worth a mention here specifically because it changes what these words are for. A list of dots and dashes is a reference. A message that beeps and flashes on somebody else's phone and slowly reveals itself is a small gift. The words on this page are the ones people most want to send to somebody, and sending them as a live thing lands rather better than sending a string of punctuation over text.