NATO Phonetic Alphabet
Type a code, name or registration and get it back as Alfa Bravo Charlie, ready to read down a phone line. The full alphabet and digits are below with the official pronunciations, and paste code words in the other direction to decode them.
NATO phonetic alphabetType a code, name or registration to spell it out loud
The alphabet
Click any row to add that letter. Stressed syllables are capitalised in the pronunciation column, following the ICAO respelling.
The digits
Nine is said NIN-er so it is not heard as the German “nein”, and three, four and five are respelled so they survive a bad radio.
Common questions
- Is it Alfa or Alpha? Juliet or Juliett?
- Officially Alfa and Juliett, and the odd spellings are deliberate. Many languages do not read "ph" as an F sound, and a final "et" is silent in French, so the standard respells both to survive being read by anyone. A chart showing Alpha and Juliet has been copied from somewhere rather than taken from the specification.
- Why is nine pronounced NIN-er?
- So it is not confused with the German "nein", and so it stays distinct from five over a noisy radio. The same reasoning gives three as TREE, four as FOW-er and five as FIFE, each respelling exists because the plain English word was misheard in real operational use.
- Is this the same as the police or military alphabet?
- Largely, yes. This is the ICAO/NATO spelling alphabet, adopted internationally in 1956, and it is what aviation, shipping, the military and most emergency services use. Some police forces, particularly in the UK and older US departments, use local variants such as Adam, Boy, Charles, which is why a chart labelled "police alphabet" can differ.
- How do I say punctuation and symbols?
- ICAO defines code words for the 26 letters and the 10 digits, and nothing at all for punctuation. So this tool lists any other character back to you instead of dropping it or inventing a word for it, and you read it whichever way your trade does. In everyday use people simply say the character: dash, slash, dot, at.
- What is it actually for?
- Making letters unmistakable when sound is unreliable. B, C, D, E, G, P, T, V and Z all sound alike on a bad line; Bravo, Charlie and Delta do not. It is the fastest way to give a booking reference, licence plate or postcode over the phone without repeating yourself three times.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. The conversion runs in your browser and the page keeps working with no connection once loaded, which matters if you are using it somewhere with poor signal, the exact situation the alphabet exists for.
Exact. The alphabet is the current ICAO/NATO standard, including the aviation pronunciations of three, five and nine that differ from ordinary English.