This document begins by describing a technique for memorizing Morse code, giving some background as to how I stumbled upon this technique and a justification for it.

Videos

Watch the videos:

• Morse code, part 1
• Morse code, part 2
• Morse code, part 3

Technique

A pdf summary of my technique: Morse_code.pdf.

Strategy: For the Morse code for a letter, punctuation or symbol, find an English word that has the same number of letters as the code has dots and dashes. Let tall letters (both capital letters and those lowercase letters that go either above the median line or below the baseline: A-Z and bdfghjklpqty) represent dashes, and short letters (aceimnorsuvwxz) represent dots. Capital letters should only be used where the associated word is a proper noun (that is, we should not force a letter to be capitalized just to match a dash; e.g., the word "old" should not be capitalized just so that it represents three dashes for the letter "O").

Thus, "at" represents ·- for the letter "a" and "bean" represents -··· for the letter "b", and so on. The full list is here, together with comments.

The alphabet

Letter	Mnemonic	Morse Code	Comments
A	at	·-
B	bean	-···	or Bean as in "Mr. Bean"
C	Cate	-·-·	as in "Cate Blanchett"
Ch	CHYM	----	as in "CHYM FM"
D	dam	-··	or "Dan" or many others
E	e	·	In mathematics, the base of the natural logarithm
F	cafe	··-·	as in a French "cafe"
G	gym	--·
H	ears	····	as in "ears" are used to hear
I	in	··
J	edgy	·---	edj-ee
K	Kit	-·-	as in "Kit-Kat"
L	else	·-··	it even begins with "ell"
M	MM	--	The year 2000 in Roman numerals: "MM"
N	No	-·	as in "Dr. No", the first James Bond movie
O	OPP	---	The Ontario Provincial Police, or alternatively, OFF!
P	apps	·--·	Something used on smart phones to practice Morse code
Q	plaq	--·-	The first four letters of "plaque"—ending in "q"
R	rye	·-·
S	sax	···
T	T	-	as in "Mr. T", or just plain "t"
U	ump	··-	as in umpire
V	veal	···-	or "veil"
W	why	·--	perhaps sub-optimal
X	foxy	-··-	as in what a fox is, or perhaps Samantha Fox
Y	yell	-·--
Z	Zhou	--··	The Zhou dynasty of China, or alternatively "Whiz" as in "Cheez Whiz"

To visualize this technique, consider the image in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Morse code mnemonics to help memorize the Morse code for alphabet.

A comment on personalization: If you or your spouse's name is "Dan", use that instead of "dam", or perhaps "doc" (as in, "What's up, doc?") or "Don". If you can't remember "bean", consider "bear", "bees", "bone", etc. My words are not necessarily the best—choose something that will help you remember.

Punctuation and symbols

Symbol	Mnemonic	Morse Code	Comments
.	stop it	·-·-·-
,	plough	--··--	the comma and a plough have a similar shape
:	pylons	---···	the original Egyptian pylons were a pair of towers on either side of an entrance
;	dododo	-·-·-·	given the state of English grammar, the semi colon is going the way of the Dodo, Doh!
?	and how	··--··	the question "and how?" may be asked
!	to yell	-·-·--	to yell requires an exclamation mark
'	rhythm	·----·	difficult, but "rhythm 'n' blues" uses two apostrophes around the "n"
"	a quote	·-··-·	quotation marks are used to denote "a quote"
-	barrel	-····-	the dash vaguely has the same shape as a barrel
(	hedge	-·--·	parentheses separates text out, a hedge separates land
)	hedged	-·--·-	once the parenthesized text is finished, it is hedged
/	knife	-··-·	a "knife" is used to slash (/)
+	clubs	·-·-·	the "+" symbol is vaguely similar to the "clubs" suit in a deck of cards
=	level	-···-	two things that have equal height are "level"
_	so flat	··--·-	the underscore is so flat
&	again	·-···	"and again..."
@	at Fiji	··-·-·	Where else would you like to be other than "at Fiji"?
$	richest	···-··-	The "richest" are those with a lot of "$"

Numbers

For numbers, we have a slightly different pattern:

For 1 through 5, count "one two three four five", only use dots up until the number you want, and dashes thereafter.

For 6 through 9, count "six seven eight nine ten", only use dashes up until the number you want, and dots thereafter.

You can use "ten" to represent "0", as 0 is represented by five dashes.

1	·----	"one TWO THREE FOUR FIVE"
2	··---	"one two THREE FOUR FIVE"
3	···--	"one two three FOUR FIVE"
4	····-	"one two three four FIVE"
5	·····	"one two three four five"
6	-····	"SIX seven eight nine ten"
7	--···	"SIX SEVEN eight nine ten"
8	---··	"SIX SEVEN EIGHT nine ten"
9	----·	"SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE ten"
0	-----	"SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN"

Practicing

It is possible to learn to send at about eight words per minute (WPM) in about a week of practice with the "Morse Code Trainer" Android app by Todd Anderson. Once you have achieved this speed, it is unlikely that you will be actually recalling the mnemonics anymore; instead, you will simply know what to send for each letter. Now that you're familiar with sending, you should practice receiving.

Receiving

Learning to receiving is more difficult than sending. In order to practice receiving, use Todd Anderson's "Morse Code Training" by initially setting it to send a burst length of one with three bursts. Set the level to 26: this will send you all the letters in the alphabet. Once you begin recognizing the Morse code for individual letters, consider increasing the number of bursts to five or the burst length to two.

Software

In the source directory linked to in the left-hand column, there is a C++ program for taking text in as input and printing out the equivalent Morse code with one symbol or space per unit time (hence, a dash is "---"). The length of the Morse code is given in words (the word "Paris " is 50 units in length and 50 units is defined to be one "word").

Background

In the army, it was commented that soldiers should learn Morse code if, for no other reason, that in situations with high interference, it is still possible to send code through a radio by toggling the hand grip. Being a reservist, this was an interesting comment, but I never was able to learn it and I never was required to learn it, either. However, once every five years I took the time to try to learn Morse code. I read the various aide memoires and mnemonics both in books and on-line, but in so many cases there was a pattern, but then there were usually so many special cases. Either that, or the mnemonics were as difficult to remember as the original.

I then considered a mnemonic using vowels for dots and consonants for dashes. This gave too little choice, and I struck upon the idea of using the height of the characters: tall letters (including capital letters) representing dashes, and short letters (aceimnorsuvwxz) representing dots. Almost immediately I came up with "yell" for "y" and I knew I was onto something. Consequently, I downloaded Moby's list of English words and using vim, I started generating the appropriate regular expressions and looking through the results.

Justification

Using words and phrases that have only the same number of characters as the Morse code I was attempting to remember simplified issues. Also, it is now possible to visualize the word in your head: this uses the visual processing part of your brain, a part of the brain that can interpret information very quickly—much more quickly than the higher reasoning parts of your brain. Thus, "bean" allows you to quickly remember the Morse code for "B" simply by seeing that "b" is tall (dash) and "ean" are all short (three dots).

The Morse code tree

This is a nice graphic I came up with that shows the density of Morse code in Figure 2. The left sub-tree is followed for a dot, while the right sub-tree is followed for a dash. The depth approximates how long it should take to send a particular character—consequently, the right-hand sub-trees are deeper than the left-hand sub-trees. Characters that take the same amount of time to send are at the same depth in the tree relative to the root.

Figure 2. The Morse code tree (click to enlarge).

Consequently, one can quickly see that the shortest codes not used for the alphabet, numbers, symbols or extended European letters include ······ and then ·······, ·····-, ····-·, ···-··, ··-···, ··-·-, ·-···· and -·····; the last eight of which require the same amount of time to send—the same time as J, Y and Q.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jeff Zarnett for suggesting "edgy" for "J" and Laura Zinn for pointing out a typographic error on this page.

Thanks to Martin Kusnir for noting two typos above.