📻NATO Phonetic Alphabet

Spelling over a bad line

Type any text and read it back as NATO words — AB12 becomes Alfa Bravo One Two — with each character shown beside its word and the whole spelling copyable. The full chart below covers A–Z, the digits (including aviation's "niner"), and click-to-copy for each.

This is the fix for the phone-call ritual of "B... no, B for... yes B": booking references, postcodes, licence plates, email addresses, serial numbers. B, C, D, E, G, P, T and V are nearly indistinguishable through a bad connection; Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Golf, Papa, Tango and Victor are unmistakable.

Why these words, exactly

The ICAO spelling alphabet — NATO adopted it, hence the common name — was finalised in 1956 after tests across accents and noisy radio circuits. The spellings are deliberate: Alfa not Alpha and Juliett with two Ts, so French speakers pronounce the F and the final T. Aviation says niner for 9 because "nine" collides with the German "nein", and often "fife" and "tree" for 5 and 3 for similar reasons.

Earlier alphabets (Able Baker) were English-centric; the ICAO set was engineered to survive any accent saying it to any other. The older solution to the same problem — spelling letters as sounds a wire can carry — is Morse code, and our Morse guide covers its logic; the text-to-speech tool will happily read your NATO spelling aloud for practice.

Frequently asked questions