Arabic Morse encodes the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet plus hamza. Like other non-Latin Morse adaptations, several letters share patterns with Latin Morse based on phonetic similarity, while letters unique to Arabic received new patterns.
Arabic Morse was developed in the late 19th century for telegraphy in the Arab world and remained in use across Arabic-speaking maritime and military networks through the 20th century. Egyptian, Saudi, and other Arabic-speaking ham operators still use it.
Arabic amateur radio operators use it for Arabic-language QSOs. Some regional broadcasters historically used Arabic Morse for news transmission in pre-fax eras.
Morse code itself has no direction. it's a sequence of dots and dashes in time. The receiver writes the Arabic letters in their natural right-to-left order on paper. Direction only affects the visual transcript, not transmission.
No. Morse encodes the abstract letter, not its visual form. The reader applies the correct connecting form when writing the received message in Arabic script.
Primarily in amateur radio. Some military and historical archives still reference it. Modern Arabic communications use Unicode and digital modes rather than Morse.
Explore all Morse code variants → Morse Code Variants Around the World