Every Cyrillic letter with its code, its Latin twin and the chant Russian operators learn it by. Tap a letter: you hear the signal while the chant syllables light up in its rhythm.
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Chart with chants
tap a letter — the syllables light up in the rhythm of the signal
short syllable — dotLONG syllable with a doubled vowel — dash, three times wider
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Russian Morse tree
left is a dot, right is a dash. Tap a node
Path—You are atnothing yet
Russian letters take all 30 nodes of the first four levels.Under the level-4 nodes is the Latin alphabet: 12 of 16 there, four empty places.
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Punctuation
Mark
Russian traditional
International
Full stop.
······
·−·−·−
differs
Comma,
·−·−·−
−−··−−
differs
Question mark?
··−−··
··−−··
Colon:
−−−···
−−−···
Hyphen-
−····−
−····−
Slash/
−··−·
−··−·
Error
········
········
The trap: the Russian comma ·−·−·− is the international full stop. If you don't know which table the sender used, commas turn into full stops.
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About Russian Morse
Russian Morse code was adopted in 1856 and sits on the same grid of codes as the international one: every Russian letter took over a Latin letter with the same signal. That is why one recording can be read two ways, and why the Cyrillic alphabet fills the Morse tree more densely than the Latin one. Russians traditionally learn it with chants — phrases whose long syllables sound like dashes.
Chants
Mnemonic
BAA-ki-te-kut = −···
A long syllable with a doubled vowel is a dash, a short one is a dot. A chant has as many syllables as the letter has signals, so it carries the rhythm.
Latin twins
Mapping
Ж = V · Я = Ä
Each Russian letter shares its code with a Latin one. Letters with no Latin counterpart took Ä, Ö, Ü, Ñ, É and the pair CH.
Ё, Й, Ъ
Special letters
Ё = Е = ·
Ё is sent as Е. Й has a code of its own. Ъ, the hard sign, has one too, but in practice operators send the soft sign Ь instead.
Morse tree
Structure
4 levels — 30 letters
Left is a dot, right is a dash. Russian letters take all 30 nodes of the first four levels; the Latin alphabet leaves four of them empty.
Punctuation
Trap
comma = ·−·−·−
In the Russian tradition a full stop is six dots, and the comma equals the international full stop. Easy to mix up when decoding.
Built for English
Frequency
О = −−−
Short codes went to frequent English letters. О, the most frequent letter in Russian, got three dashes — the longest three-signal code.
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Frequently asked questions
The codes are the same; the letters are different. Each Russian letter shares its signal with a Latin one: А with A, Ж with V, Я with Ä. So one recording reads both in Cyrillic and in Latin letters, and only the meaning tells you which alphabet the sender used. Punctuation differs too: in the Russian tradition a full stop is six dots, and the comma equals the international full stop.
With chants. Russian operators learn each letter by a short phrase whose long syllables, the ones with a doubled vowel, sound like dashes and short ones like dots. “ay-DAA” is a dot and a dash, so А; “BAA-ki-te-kut” is a dash and three dots, so Б. A chant always has as many syllables as the letter has signals. Tap a letter in the chart above to hear it in time.
Chants were passed on orally, in army, navy and radio schools, and different places settled on different ones. Any of them works as long as its rhythm matches the code: “ay-DAA” and “ay-VAA” both give a dot and a dash. The chart above lists the most common chant first and the others in each letter's card, and every one is checked: long syllables sit exactly where the dashes are.
As Е, a single dot. Ё has no code of its own, so when you decode you always get Е. That is why Russian Morse has 32 letters rather than the 33 of the Russian alphabet. Russian writing often drops the dots over Ё anyway, so the meaning hardly ever suffers. The translator above does the same: type “ёлка” and the first letter goes out as one dot.
There is a code for it: −−·−−, the same as the Spanish Ñ, and it sits on the fifth level of the Morse tree next to Э. In practice, though, operators send the soft sign Ь (−··−) instead, and the text stays readable. The translator above sends Ъ with its own code, and the chant for remembering it is “TVYOOR-DYYY-ne-MYAAG-KIIY”, five syllables for five signals.
In the Russian tradition a full stop is six dots (······) and a comma is ·−·−·−. In the international table ·−·−·− is the full stop itself, and the comma is −−··−−. If you don't know which table the sender used, commas turn into full stops. The translator on this page has a Punctuation switch: international by default, as is usual today, or Russian traditional for older texts.