Morse Code Translator

A code designed around how often letters appear

The elegance of Morse is that it is not arbitrary. When Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail devised it in the 1830s, they reportedly went to a local newspaper's print shop and counted how many pieces of type the compositors kept for each letter — a rough but effective measure of how often each letter is used in English. The commonest letters were then given the shortest codes. That is why 'E', the most frequent letter in English by a wide margin, is a single dot, and 'T' is a single dash, while rare letters like 'Q' and 'Z' get four symbols each. The effect is that ordinary English text transmits substantially faster than it would with fixed-length codes. It is variable-length encoding by frequency, arrived at empirically more than a century before information theory gave it a mathematical foundation.

SOS and the myth of the acronym

Everyone knows SOS means 'Save Our Souls' or 'Save Our Ship', and everyone is wrong — the letters do not stand for anything at all. SOS was adopted as the international distress signal in 1906 for an entirely practical reason: in Morse it is three dots, three dashes, three dots, sent as one continuous unbroken sequence. That pattern is rhythmically distinctive, impossible to confuse with anything else, unmistakable even through heavy interference, and simple enough for a panicking non-expert to tap out. The backronyms were invented afterwards by people who assumed such a famous signal must be an abbreviation. It is a good reminder that the best emergency signals are chosen for how they sound under terrible conditions, not for what they spell.