Word · Copy · Practice

Fish in Morse Code

Copy the Morse code for Fish, hear it played back, or open it in the translator to edit it.

Fish
..-. .. ... ....
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Letter by letter

How "Fish" is built in Morse

Fish is 4 characters — 12 dots and 1 dash in all. Here is each letter with its Morse code so you can send or write it one symbol at a time:

F ..-.
I ..
S ...
H ....

Sending Fish by sound or light

Fish is 33 Morse units long, counting a 1-unit gap inside each character and a 3-unit gap between letters. At a beginner's 5 words per minute that is 7.9 seconds of signal; an experienced operator at 25 WPM sends it in 1.6 seconds.

Speed5 WPM13 WPM20 WPM25 WPM
Time to send7.9 s3.0 s2.0 s1.6 s

Why the gaps matter

Run the marks together with no letter gaps — as happens on evenly spaced beads or an engraving — and Fish becomes ..-........... That string can be split into real Morse characters in 3,405 different ways, so a reader cannot tell which one you meant. Keep a visible gap between letters, or read why most Morse jewelry is unreadable.

Saying it out loud

Morse is not the only way a word gets through a noisy channel. When an operator has to spell Fish by voice, each letter becomes its NATO phonetic word — the same alphabet used by aviation and the military, and the reason “B” is never mistaken for “D”:

Foxtrot · India · Sierra · Hotel

Stressed as FOKS trot — IN dee ah — see AIR ah — hoh TELL. The full table is on the NATO alphabet page.

How to read it

The format in one line

Dot
.   one short signal (1 unit)
Dash
-   one long signal (3 units)
Letter gap
a single space between letters (3 units)
Word gap
/   with surrounding spaces (7 units)

Keep going

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