Ö in Morse code

No. ITU-R M.1677-1 defines the 26 letters A to Z and only one accented letter, É. Ö comes from the national tables of German, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Turkish, so operators who share one of those languages know it and others may not.

With a station you don’t know, send OE instead. Between two operators who both use Ö, the extension keeps the spelling exact and is shorter too.

German, Swedish, Finnish and Estonian tables send Ö with this signal, and the Hungarian and Turkish tables do too. Like Ä and Ü, it was in Gerke’s German code before the international code was settled in 1865.

Danish and Norwegian read the same signal as Ø, and Polish as Ó. Some North American operators send it for an exclamation mark, a habit from American Morse.

National tables reuse spare signals, so ---. is also Ø (Danish and Norwegian) and Ó (Polish). Each table was made for one language, so the letters never clash at home: read the signal in the language of the message.

Decoders have to pick one letter. The Morse code to English decoder on this site reads the signal as Ö, whichever letter was meant.

Send OE, --- ., with a normal letter gap. Every operator can copy it. It takes 15 units, 1,000 ms at 18 WPM, 2 units longer than Ö.

German writes OE when the umlaut is not available, so the stand-in reads naturally in German names: Köln becomes KOELN.

• Hear it:

  at 18 WPM one unit lasts 66.7 ms, so Ö takes 867 ms (13 units). Press Play above, slow it to 5 WPM to pick out each element, or turn on Repeat.

• Tap it:

  a short tap for each dot and a press three times as long for each dash, with a dot’s pause between them: long, long, long, short.

• Flash it:

  light on for each element, off between them, no faster than 7 WPM. There a unit is 171 ms and Ö takes 2.2 seconds; the Flashlight signaler keeps that pace.

• Write it:

  ---. as one group, with a space on each side so it does not run into the next letter.

• Run O and E together with no gap, --- then ., and you have Ö: the same O and E that German writes for Ö.
• Hungarian learners say “őrállások” (“sentry posts”): each syllable with a long vowel is a dash and the others are dots.
• Learn the sound, not the picture: say dah-dah-dah-dit until you hear it as one shape.

• MÖBIUS is -- ---. -... .. ..- ..., six letters and 59 units long (3.9 seconds at 18 WPM).
• KÖLN is -.- ---. .-.. -., four letters and 45 units long (3.0 seconds at 18 WPM).

To hear a whole word or sentence, type it into the Morse code translator. The standard letters are all on the alphabet chart, and the other national letters are with the rest of the accented letters.