Word · Copy · Practice

You in Morse Code

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

You
-.-- --- ..-
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Letter by letter

How "You" is built in Morse

You is 3 characters — 3 dots and 7 dashes in all. Here is each letter with its Morse code so you can send or write it one symbol at a time:

Y -.--
O ---
U ..-

Sending You by sound or light

You is 37 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 8.9 seconds of signal; an experienced operator at 25 WPM sends it in 1.8 seconds.

Speed5 WPM13 WPM20 WPM25 WPM
Time to send8.9 s3.4 s2.2 s1.8 s

Why the gaps matter

Run the marks together with no letter gaps — as happens on evenly spaced beads or an engraving — and You becomes -.-----..-. That string can be split into real Morse characters in 385 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 You 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”:

Yankee · Oscar · Uniform

Stressed as YANG key — OSS car — YOU nee form. 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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