Direction

Letters and digits are spelled out; punctuation has no standard code word, so it is skipped rather than invented. Reading back accepts the common misspellings “Alpha” and “Juliet”, and the spoken digit forms like “Niner”.

The alphabet

ICAO spells two of these differently from almost everyone else, on purpose: Alfa avoids “ph”, which is not read as an /f/ outside English, and Juliett doubles the t so French speakers do not drop it.

AAlfa

BBravo

CCharlie

DDelta

EEcho

FFoxtrot

GGolf

HHotel

IIndia

JJuliett

KKilo

LLima

MMike

NNovember

OOscar

PPapa

QQuebec

RRomeo

SSierra

TTango

UUniform

VVictor

WWhiskey

XX-ray

YYankee

ZZulu

Digits

The plain words are what this tool writes. The second column is how they are said over the radio — respelled so they survive a noisy channel and do not sound like each other.

0 ZeroZE-RO

1 OneWUN

2 TwoTOO

3 ThreeTREE

4 FourFOW-er

5 FiveFIFE

6 SixSIX

7 SevenSEV-en

8 EightAIT

9 NineNIN-er

How it works

1Type what you need to spell — a booking reference, a postcode, a name — and it comes back word by word.

2The spellings are ICAO’s own: Alfa without the "ph", Juliett with two t’s. Both exist so speakers of other languages read them the way English speakers say them.

3Reading back accepts the everyday misspellings too, so "Alpha Juliet" works.

4Press Speak to hear it, which is usually the point — you are about to say it to someone.

NATO Phonetic Alphabet

How it works

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