I Love You in Morse Code

Of everything people ask a Morse translator for, this is the phrase that comes back most often — and usually not because someone plans to transmit it. It gets engraved on rings, beaded onto bracelets, tattooed along a forearm and hidden in wedding bands.

The appeal is that it reads as decoration to everyone except the person who knows. A row of dots and dashes looks like a pattern; only someone who can read it, or who was told, sees the sentence. That is a very old use of the code, long predating its use as jewellery: a message in plain sight that only the intended reader decodes.

The practical catch is length. Eight letters across three words come to twenty-eight signals plus the gaps, which is a lot of pattern for a narrow band. Most jewellery designs either shorten it to the initials, stack the three words on separate lines, or run it around the whole piece.

The mistake almost every hand-made version makes is the spacing. Between letters there should be a gap of three time units, and between the words seven. Written down, that word gap is what the slash stands for: .. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-.

Drop the slashes and you get ...-.. ---...- .-.-- --- ..-, which is not the same message at all — a reader would try to split it into different letters entirely. On a bracelet the equivalent is using one bead size for every gap, which makes the piece unreadable even to someone who knows the code.

If you are designing something physical, use three clearly different widths: the dot, the dash, and the gap. The Morse code timing explains exactly how those lengths relate.

• I miss you in Morse code
• Thank you in Morse code
• Morse code alphabet A to Z