Morse Code

Morse code is a communications-based Decryption element, an encoding system used since the 1830s to wire messages across long distances. Morse code is one of the most commonly-used ciphers in puzzlehunting, along with Braille, Flag Semaphore, and five-bit Binary.

Background

See also: W:Morse Code

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Puzzle Applications

Unlike the other major puzzlehunting ciphers, Morse code is rarely conducive to extraction—more often, it's consigned to the first few steps of the puzzle, immediately notable due to the presence of notated dots and dashes, flashes of light, or beeps of varying length. Where it is used in extraction, there is generally a very clear determiner of whether a given input is short or long and where the breaks between letters are.

Strategy

Spotting the usage of Morse code

Where it isn't immediately apparent (e.g. dots and dashes directly on the page), the usage of Morse code is often clued using the title or flavortext—references to dots and dashes are common, as are references to the telegraph or words like "transmission" or "wired". Regardless of whether flavortext hints at it or not, be on the lookout for things that can easily be assigned values of long and short and have clear breaks to act as letter boundaries.

Translating Morse code

Many Morse code charts and interpreters can be found online. To save time on transcription, however, one may wish to memorize Morse code. Unlike the other systems, however, there is no easy correspondence to alphabetical order, as Morse code is ordered by frequency; instead, one may wish to employ a number of mnemonics, such as those seen here.

Notable Examples

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See Also

• Puzzles that involve Morse Code