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Y in Morse Code

Y is -.-- - dah-di-dah-dah, 13 units, 780 milliseconds at 20 words per minute.

Advanced settings

Farnsworth timing: characters stay at full speed while the gaps between them grow. Set it below the speed above.

Dot / dash / letter gap / word gap -

Durations at the speed set above.

Characters without a Morse equivalent are skipped.

-.--

Press play in the box above - Y is already in it.

How long Y takes

Y is 1 dot and 3 dashes. With the gaps that comes to 13 units, number 26 of 26 by length.

  • 5 WPM: 3,120 ms
  • 13 WPM: 1,200 ms
  • 20 WPM: 780 ms

The arithmetic behind them is on the timing page.

What Y gets confused with

3 characters sit one element away from Y:

  • C -.-. - a dot in fourth place instead of a dash
  • K -.- - the last dash missing
  • X -..- - a dot in third place instead of a dash

Y in the tree

  • Built from: - = T, -. = N and -.- = K, then -.--
  • Carries on into: no other letter - a leaf of the tree
  • Backwards: --.- = Q
  • Koch position: 18 of 26

The tree shows the whole shape, the trainer teaches it by ear.

Why Y has this code

Y makes up about 2 per cent of English text, which is number 18 of 26 by frequency, against number 26 by length. That is a mismatch in the expensive direction: Y turns up more often than its code length allows for, so it costs airtime on every message.

The lengths were set by counting, not by theory - the alphabet page has that story.

Y in American Morse

The American code, used on the landline telegraph until the 1920s, wrote Y as .. .. instead of -.--. Note the gap inside the character: American Morse used internal spaces, which is what made it so hard to read automatically and why the international code replaced it on the radio.

The full table has the other ten.

Worth knowing about Y

Y has the longest code of any letter relative to how often it is used - thirteen units for a letter that turns up in two words in a hundred.

Frequently asked questions

Keep going

Alphabet
Chart
Morse tree
Koch Trainer