The notion of Morse code is familiar to many school pupils through interests outside of mathematics and computer studies. How can this knowledge be related to algebraic coding theory? The difficulty is that mainstream algebraic coding theory deals with block codes—in which the codewords are of uniform length. Morse code has codewords of variable length in which short codewords are used to represent common characters and longer ones for representing characters which occur less frequently (like. for E as opposed to —..—for X).