NATO Phonetic Alphabet

What is the NATO phonetic alphabet?

The NATO phonetic alphabet gives every letter a distinct code word — A is Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie — so letters can be spelled clearly over radio or phone, even through noise, accents, or a bad connection. It’s also called the military alphabet, the ICAO alphabet, or officially the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. Pilots, air traffic controllers, ships, armed forces, emergency services, and call centers all use it.

How to use this tool

• Spell: type a name, email, or booking code and see it letter by letter in code words, with pronunciations. Switch between the NATO, police, and WWII alphabets. Tap Listen to hear it read out word by word, at slow, normal, or fast speed, and copy it as code words, a letter list, or pronunciations.
• Decode: paste code words (“Sierra Oscar Sierra”) to turn them back into text. It understands all three alphabets and spellings like Alfa, Juliet, and Niner.
• Practice: four quick drills — letter to code word, code word to letter, spelling real words, and listening. The spelling and listening words come from our English dictionary, so they’re different every time.

NATO phonetic alphabet chart

All 26 code words with their pronunciation (the stressed part is in capitals), the radio numbers, and a printable version. Tap any letter to hear it.

How to pronounce the code words

The pronunciations above follow the official ICAO guide. A few are worth noting: Papa is stressed at the end (pah-PAH), Hotel is hoh-TELL, Quebec is keh-BECK, and Charlie may also be said “SHAR-lee.” The official spellings are Alfa and Juliett: with “ph,” speakers of some languages might not say an F sound, and the double T tells French speakers the final T isn’t silent. Most people write Alpha and Juliet, and both are understood.

Numbers in the phonetic alphabet

Numbers are spoken digit by digit, with a few special pronunciations so they can’t be confused: 3 is “tree,” 4 is “fower,” 5 is “fife,” and 9 is “niner” (so it isn’t mistaken for five, or for the German nein). Round numbers use “hundred” and “thousand”: 1,500 is “wun tousand fife hundred.” A decimal point is “decimal” (or “point”), so 118.1 is “wun wun ait decimal wun.”

The police alphabet (LAPD / APCO)

Many US police departments, including the LAPD, and other public-safety agencies use the APCO police alphabet instead of NATO’s. It uses first names and everyday words — Adam, Boy, Charles, David — which is why you hear “Adam,” “Lincoln,” or “Mary” on police radio. More and more agencies are switching to NATO for working with other services, but the police alphabet is still widely used. Here are the NATO, police, and WWII alphabets side by side:

The old military alphabet: Able, Baker, Charlie

Before NATO, the US Army and Navy used the Joint Army/Navy alphabet — Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox — throughout World War II. It worked well for English speakers but not for allies who spoke other languages. In the early 1950s the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) worked with linguists to test words that are easy to say and hear in English, French, and Spanish. The result — Alfa, Bravo, Charlie — was adopted by ICAO and NATO in 1956 and is still used today. Pick WWII (Able Baker) in the tool to spell in the old alphabet.

Military and radio slang from the alphabet

The code words also turned into everyday radio shorthand:

Spelling an email or booking code over the phone

• Say each letter as a code word and pause between groups: “Juliett Oscar Hotel November — at — …”.
• Say symbols as words: “at” (@), “dot” (.), “dash” or “hyphen” (-), “underscore” (_), “slash” (/).
• Say “number” before digits so they aren’t mistaken for letters: “number seven.”
• For booking codes, read them back to confirm. Copy the letter list from the Spell tab to have it in front of you.

How to memorize the phonetic alphabet

1. Learn it in chunks of five or six letters (A–F, G–L, M–R, S–Z) instead of all 26 at once.
2. Spell your own name, your street, and car number plates you see — out loud.
3. Use the Practice tab: start with Letter → code word, then move on to spelling and listening drills.
4. Notice the patterns: many words are familiar — Golf, Hotel, Tango, Whiskey, Zulu.

Is this the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)?

No. This is a spelling alphabet — code words for letters. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a different system that linguists and dictionaries use to write down speech sounds, with symbols like /ʃ/ and /θ/. Despite the similar names, they have nothing in common.

More tools

Send messages in dots and dashes with the Morse Code Translator, or turn text into 0s and 1s with the Binary Translator.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. Everything runs in your browser, including the audio, so nothing you type is uploaded or stored. Your best practice scores are saved only on your own device.