🗣️ Phonetic Alphabet

ICAO/NATO 26 words + digits · encode & decode · no audio, no account

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B and D, M and N, F and S do not survive a bad line — the alphabet fix this has been standard at ICAO since 1956. Encode anything and get the word chain with separators; paste a word chain back and it decodes, tolerantly, one word at a time. The table is static and complete: including the official spellings Alfa and Juliett the standards documents actually use.

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Why Alfa, and why Juliett with two t's

The words were chosen for cross-language distinctiveness, not spelling elegance: non-native speakers confuse v/f and j/y, so the ICAO text writes Alfa and Juliett — the double-t stops French readers pronouncing it "Jew-ette", and the f stops the Spanish aitch. Numbers ride the same table (Three=Niner was proposed but rejected; the aviation "niner" lives on informally only). This page follows the published words and adds nothing.

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