NATO phonetic alphabet

Type a word, a name or a reference number and each character comes out as its code word, ready to read down a phone line: Hello becomes Hotel Echo Lima Lima Oscar. A slash marks the end of each word, or choose One per line for a list to read from.

Numbers says digits the ordinary way or the way ICAO specifies for radio: tree, fower, fife and niner. Swap to go backwards. It reads the official spellings and the common ones, so Alpha, Juliet and X-ray all work.

The alphabet's official name is the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. The International Civil Aviation Organization brought in its final version on 1 March 1956, after Jean-Paul Vinay, a linguistics professor at the Université de Montréal, spent 1948 and 1949 working with ICAO on the research.

The words had to survive a bad line and a speaker from anywhere, so the final choice was made after hundreds of thousands of comprehension tests involving 31 nationalities. The version it replaced, the one the US used in the Second World War, was known as Able Baker, after its words for A and B.

Two words look misspelled on purpose. Alfa and Juliett are spelled that way so that people who don't know English spelling still say them correctly.

Four digits change too when spoken on the radio: three is tree, four is fower, five is fife and nine is niner. A decimal point is said as decimal or point.