No in Morse Code
No in Morse code is -. ---. Two letters. N is long, short. O is three longs. The space in the middle is the gap between the letters.
Reading the pattern
NO is mostly dashes: four of its five signals are long. N is -., the mirror image of A. O is ---, the same three dashes that sit in the middle of SOS.
The letter gap matters here more than it looks. Push the five signals together and they don’t make any letter at all. Put the gap in the wrong place and you get different letters: break it after the third signal and it reads -.- --. Break it after the first and it reads - .---. Only a gap after the second signal gives you NO.
Play -. --- in the translator to hear it: a quick long-short, a pause, then three slow tones.
How to tap or flash no
A dot is one unit of time and a dash is three. The pause inside a letter is one unit, and the pause between letters is three. NO takes 19 units from start to finish, which makes it shorter than YES at 25.
With a light:
- N: one long flash, one short flash.
- Pause.
- O: three long flashes.
When tapping, make the dashes clearly heavier or slower than the dot. A tapped NO is almost all dashes, so if your long and short taps sound alike, the listener has nothing to go on. At 5 words per minute (WPM), a slow learner’s speed, NO takes about four and a half seconds.
No in radio shorthand
Radio operators don’t need a shortcut for this one. In the ITU’s list of abbreviations for maritime radio (Recommendation ITU-R M.1172), NO is itself the abbreviation for “no (negative).” The same document says some Q codes (three-letter codes starting with Q) can be turned into a yes or a no by sending C or NO straight after them. The same list has NIL, -. .. .-.., for “I have nothing to send to you.”
For yes, the ITU abbreviation is the single letter C. The yes in Morse code page covers it along with the full spelling.
Where people use it
NO turns up as an answer in puzzles and escape rooms, since it’s short and the dashes look distinct on paper. It also works as a quick reply when two people tap or flash yes-or-no answers to each other. For more short words, see the phrases hub or look up single letters in the Morse code alphabet.
FAQ
What is no in Morse code?
No in Morse code is -. ---. N is a dash then a dot, and O is three dashes. Leave a gap between the N and the O. Without it, the five signals don’t decode as any letter.
How do you tap no in Morse code?
Tap one long, then one short for N. Pause, then tap three long for O. Make the long taps about three times the length of the short one, and the pause between letters about as long as one long tap.
What does NO mean in radio Morse code?
It means no. The ITU abbreviation list for maritime radio defines NO as “no (negative),” and operators can send it after certain Q codes to give them a negative meaning. The matching abbreviation for yes is C.