Thank You in Morse Code

Spelled out, thank you is - .... .- -. -.- / -.-- --- ..-: twenty-four elements plus gaps, roughly five seconds at a conversational twenty words per minute. That is a long time to spend on a courtesy.

So operators shorten it. TU (- ..-) is the standard, five elements, and it is what you will hear at the end of almost every contest exchange. TNX and TKS both appear in more relaxed conversation, and 73 — best regards — often carries the same warmth at sign-off.

These are not slang so much as a working vocabulary. They come partly from the commercial telegraph era, where operators were paid by volume and every saved element was money, and partly from the simple fact that a shorter transmission is more likely to get through interference intact.

If you are practising sending rather than receiving, this phrase is unusually useful, because it contains the two things beginners get wrong.

First, K (-.-) sits at the end of a word, so the seven-unit word gap has to follow immediately — and a hesitant hand tends to stretch it into something that reads as a pause between messages. Second, THANK contains N (-.) directly after A (.-), the classic confusable pair. Run them together and A-N becomes P.

Send it slowly against the audio on this page until the gaps sound the same as the machine's. Consistent spacing at a modest speed is worth far more than a fast, ragged fist. The Morse code timing explains why each gap is the length it is.

• Goodbye in Morse code, and 73
• Good morning in Morse code
• YES in Morse code