Arabic Morse code assigns a unique sequence of dots and dashes to each of the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, following the International Telecommunication Union recommendation for non-Latin telegraphy. This free tool encodes Arabic text into Morse and decodes Morse back into Arabic, instantly and entirely in your browser.
How it works
Encoding looks up each Arabic letter in a fixed table and replaces it with its dot-dash code. For example, alef maps to .-, baa to -..., and seen to .... Letters within a word are joined with single spaces, and words are separated by three spaces so the boundaries stay readable.
Decoding reverses the table: each space-separated code is matched back to its Arabic letter, and three-space (or slash) gaps become spaces between words. Any token without a known mapping is passed through unchanged so nothing is silently dropped.
Brief history of Arabic Morse
When Morse telegraphy spread across the Ottoman Empire and later the Arab world in the nineteenth century, operators needed a way to transmit Arabic text over the same wire infrastructure designed for Latin script. The ITU (then the International Telegraph Union) developed standardised dot-dash sequences for the Arabic alphabet, adapted from the Latin sequences with some new patterns for letters that do not exist in Latin.
Arabic Morse saw active use across the Middle East and North Africa for commercial and military telegraphy well into the mid-twentieth century. Today it has no practical operational use, but it remains of interest to amateur radio operators (ham radio) who may encounter historical material, to cryptography enthusiasts, and as a demonstration of how non-Latin scripts were adapted for early digital transmission.
Worked example
The word سلام (salaam, peace) contains four letters: seen, lam, alef, meem.
| Letter | Arabic | Morse |
|---|---|---|
| Seen | س | ... |
| Lam | ل | .-.. |
| Alef | ا | .- |
| Meem | م | -- |
Encoded: ... .-.. .- --
To decode it back: split on spaces, look up each code in the table, and join the
results to recover سلام.
How variant letter forms are handled
Arabic has several letters with multiple Unicode code points depending on the presence of hamza, madda, or wasla:
أ إ آ ٱall share alef’s code.-ة(taa marbuta) reuses the code for taaتى(alef maqsura) reuses the code for yaيء(bare hamza) has its own assigned code
This means that Morse round-trips are not always reversible to the original Unicode
spelling: encoding أ to .- and decoding back gives the bare ا, not the
hamza-bearing form. For transcription of modern text where hamza placement matters,
Morse is not the right tool — it is a communication encoding designed for the
letter’s sound, not its orthographic form.
Separator convention
The ITU specification for Arabic Morse uses a single space between letters within a
word and three spaces (or a slash /) between words. When decoding, the tool accepts
both three spaces and slashes as word boundaries, so you can use whichever is more
readable in the text you are working with.