Good Morning in Morse Code

Spelled out this is one of the longer everyday phrases in Morse: --. --- --- -.. / -- --- .-. -. .. -. --., thirty-four elements before you count the gaps. Nobody sends that.

The working forms are GM (--. --) for good morning, GA for good afternoon and GE for good evening. Four or five elements instead of thirty-four, and instantly understood by any operator anywhere.

There is a practical wrinkle behind them: on the shortwave bands the person you are talking to may be in a completely different time zone, so which greeting fits is genuinely ambiguous. Many operators simply use GM regardless, or skip the greeting and open with their call sign.

This phrase is a workout for one specific weakness: distinguishing runs of dashes. GOOD alone contains O twice (--- each) and G (--.), and MORNING adds M (--) and another G.

At speed, telling -- from --- from --. is genuinely hard, and it is the most common source of copying errors for intermediate learners. The cure is not slowing the characters down — that teaches you to count dashes, which caps your speed permanently. It is hearing the same characters repeatedly at a realistic pace until each has its own shape.

Play this phrase on the Morse code audio page at 18 words per minute and listen for the difference between the M in MORNING and the O next to it. Once that gap is obvious, most of the alphabet follows.

• HELLO in Morse code
• Goodbye in Morse code
• Hear it at different speeds