I Miss You in Morse Code: the Spacing Is the Message

I Miss You in Morse Code: the Spacing Is the Message

"I miss you" in Morse code is .. / -- .. ... ... / -.-- --- ..- — I is .., MISS is -- .. ... ..., YOU is -.-- --- ..-. Every letter below is checked against Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1 (10/2009), the ITU text that defines International Morse code, rather than against another page's table.

The part almost nobody reprints is clause 2: a dash equals three dots, the gap between two letters equals three dots, and the gap between two words equals seven dots. Typed as characters that seven-dot gap has nowhere to live, which is why the string needs slashes — and why deleting them turns the opening of the phrase into the standard's own question mark.

That matters more than the cipher. Of 5,199 personalised pages built on SubhSandesh since 2026-03-12, 90.9% were published and shared (4,724 of 5,199), so what fails is rarely the wording. And 1.35 pages per registered creator says most senders build once — the awkward fact under any private code.

The encoding, letter by letter, from the ITU table

Clause 1.1.1 of M.1677-1 prints the whole alphabet. Read off it, the six letters this phrase needs are I = .., M = --, S = ..., Y = -.--, O = --- and U = ..-.

Assembled in order that gives .. / -- .. ... ... / -.-- --- ..-: eight letters, 22 marks, and no other rendering is correct in International Morse.

One detail worth having: the ITU sets its dashes in U+2212 MINUS SIGN and its dots in U+002E FULL STOP, while the hyphen on your keyboard is U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS. The standard's own typography is not the one you are copying.

What the standard actually says about spacing

Clause 2 is four lines long and is the entire timing specification.

The right-hand column is not wrong, but it is not the standard's language either: M.1677-1 never uses the word "unit", and defines everything as a multiple of one dot.

That is a tell. The six pages ranking for this phrase all reprint the 1/3/1/3/7 chart, three invoke "ITU" by name, and not one cites a recommendation number.

Delete the gaps and the message changes

Run the letters of "I MISS" together with no letter gaps, and check the result against the ITU's own tables:

• I + M + I is ..--.., which clause 1.1.3 lists as the question mark, glossed as a "request for repetition of a transmission not understood".
• M + I is --.., which clause 1.1.1 gives as the letter Z.
• I + S is ....., which clause 1.1.2 gives as the figure 5.
• I + S + S is ........ — eight dots, which clause 1.1.3 lists as Error.

So an unspaced "I MISS" contains, in order, a request to repeat, a Z, a 5 and the error signal.

This is not a curiosity. The Recommendation builds its own service signals out of run-together letters — -.-.-, the starting signal, is K and A joined — so collapsing a gap is how the code makes new symbols. Spacing is part of the alphabet, not presentation.

One ranking page gets this half right. A tool site on page one states that "MISS and YOU are exactly the same length at 10 signals each" — true by mark count, false by the only length the standard defines.

Under clause 2.1 a dash is three dots, so MISS runs 29 dot units and YOU runs 37: YOU is 28% longer. The same page's claim that IMY fits nearly three times inside the full phrase does check out, at 29 units against 83.

There is no Morse character in Unicode

If the seven-dot gap cannot survive being typed, is there a correct way to type Morse at all? No. Searching the current Unicode Character Database for names containing "MORSE" returns zero hits across all 41,000-odd assigned lines — no Morse block, no dot character, no dash character.

People borrow U+002E FULL STOP, U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT (the ·−·· −−− ···− · style), U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS or U+2212 MINUS SIGN instead. All are legible; none is specified. The slash is stranger still, because Morse already has a character for "/" — clause 1.1.3 assigns it -..-..

The phrase is 83 dot units, and half of it is silence

Because the standard defines every gap in dots, the phrase has an exact length. I is 3 units, MISS is 29 and YOU is 37, plus two seven-dot word gaps: "I MISS YOU" is 83 dot units.

Only 40 of those are key-down. The other 43 — 51.8% of the message — are silence, and the two word gaps alone are 14 units, 16.9% of the whole.

So the larger half carries no sound, and the part everyone deletes is a sixth of it. At 20 words per minute the phrase takes about 5.0 seconds; at the 5 words-per-minute a beginner manages, about 20.

Who can still read it

In the United States, receiving Morse was a licence requirement until the FCC's Report and Order in WT Docket No. 05-235 (FCC 06-178, adopted 15 December 2006) removed it, eliminating "the requirement that an individual demonstrate five wpm proficiency in telegraphy" for the General and Amateur Extra Class licences. No US amateur licence has tested reception since.

An archaeology note from the same order: the FCC defines international Morse by pointing at "ITU-T Recommendation F.1 (March, 1998), Division B". M.1677-1 states in its own footnote that Division B of F.1, which also addressed the Morse code, has been withdrawn — so the definition the 2006 order points at no longer exists.

Where trained reception still matters is assistive technology. A 2026 study in Sensors built an electrooculography interface letting a person with locked-in syndrome compose Arabic letters by Morse-coded eye movements, reporting an information transfer rate of 10.43 letters per minute and 83.96% ± 4.59% classification accuracy — roughly 46 seconds for eight letters. There, Morse is the only channel, not a flourish.

When the puzzle is the point, and when it isn't

A code the recipient cannot read is a puzzle, not a message. That is not automatically bad; the question is whether the decoding is part of the gift.

It works when the object outlives the sentence and there is time to explain it: a bracelet, a tattoo, a ring engraving, a shared in-joke. The median SubhSandesh page runs 2.5 hours from first save to last edit (sampled on the apology dashboard, n = 1,396) — deliberate composing.

It fails when the message has a job to do. A string of dots hands the other person homework and a chance to get it wrong. 48.3% of shared page views happen on a phone (27,725 of 57,456) — one hand, no patience for a lookup table.

Streak is the honest version of the Morse instinct: a rhythm the other person can join, with no text to get right and nothing to decode. If the message is really "I miss you" and you want it read today, the plain-English I-miss-you page does that job — but know what it is. The site's own template list defines it as an "'I miss you' page for a girlfriend/partner", so sending it to a friend, a sibling or a parent means using a page written for someone else.

For the numeric side — 143, 459, 07734, the Mandarin 520 family — we keep a separate page on miss you number code meaning. Those codes stand in for the words and must be agreed in advance; Morse spells the words out, is fully specified, and fails for the opposite reason: almost nobody carries the decoder.

Where this page loses

Every SubhSandesh figure above is platform-wide, none of it segmented by language or country, so nothing here is a US number — and the database records which template was opened, never who received it. The 48.3% figure counts page views, not unique visitors: one recipient opening a page twenty times is twenty views.

We hold no first-party data on Morse, and if you want an audio tone, a flasher or a copy button, the tool sites on this SERP have them and we do not. What none of them has is the seven-dot gap. We cannot confirm any commercial terms from our own records and will not state any; the template gallery is where to look.

Sources

• Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1 (10/2009), International Morse code, ITU-R. Letters at 1.1.1, figures 1.1.2, punctuation and service signals 1.1.3, spacing clause 2.
• Unicode Character Database, UnicodeData.txt (current release), Unicode Consortium.
• Federal Communications Commission, Report and Order and Order on Reconsideration, WT Docket No. 05-235 (FCC 06-178), released 19 December 2006.
• Alzahrani, Alomari, Alkilani, Alghamdi and Melhem, "Design and Performance Evaluation of a Low-Cost High-SNR EOG Sensing System for Arabic Locked-In Syndrome Communication", Sensors 26(8):2425, 15 April 2026 (open access, CC BY). Abstract read via the Europe PMC REST API; the full text was not opened.