Military Alphabet: the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, Spelled and Spoken

The military alphabet, properly the NATO phonetic alphabet or the ICAO spelling alphabet, gives each letter a word that cannot be confused with any other over a bad radio or telephone line: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. The International Civil Aviation Organization chose the words in the early 1950s after testing hundreds of candidates with speakers of English, French and Spanish, and NATO adopted the list in 1956. It is used by pilots, air traffic control, the armed forces, ships, emergency services and, increasingly, anyone spelling a surname to a call centre.

Two spellings look wrong and are not. ICAO writes Alfa with an f and Juliett with two t’s so that a French or Spanish speaker reads them aloud correctly; "Alpha" with a ph and "Juliet" with one t would be pronounced differently. This speller uses the ICAO spellings. Every word has an official pronunciation as well, printed in the chart below with the stressed syllable in capitals: LEE-MAH, KEH-BECK, OSS-CAH. It is not the International Phonetic Alphabet, the linguists’ system of sound symbols; the two share a name and nothing else.

Digits are read one at a time, never as whole numbers: 47 is four seven, not forty-seven, because forty and fourteen sound alike. Four of them are deliberately mispronounced to survive noise: 3 is tree, 4 is fow-er, 5 is fife and 9 is niner, so that nine is never heard as five and five never as fire. Zero is said in full, never "oh", because oh is the letter O. The speller writes digits as words (Seven) and the chart gives the ICAO pronunciation (SEV-EN); a decimal point is Decimal, and a dash is Dash.

A few things worth knowing when you read one out: pause between words, not between letters; say the code word alone, not "B for Bravo", which doubles the airtime; and on a phone, where nobody expects Alfa Bravo, "B as in Bravo" is acceptable and clearer. The only country name in the alphabet is India, and the only word that is also a sport is Golf; both come up in quizzes, and both are on the chart.