Let's Talk About the History of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, a Universally Adopted Spelling Code (2024)

• The NATO phonetic alphabet is a universally adopted spelling code.
• It helps agencies, businesses, services, aviators, and civilians communicate more clearly and precisely.
• Familiarizing yourself with the letters could help you spell out your name over the phone while paying bills or placing food orders.

Standing in front of the cashier in the take-out line, you tell them your name so you can pick up that pizza you called in 20 minutes ago. The confused cashier tells you, “Hmm, I don’t have an order for ‘Kim.’ Someone just picked up an order for ‘Jim,’ and I have one here for ‘Tim.’”

Usually, that kind of communication snafu is a minor inconvenience. In this case, you’ll either mistakenly take the order for “Tim,” or you’ll place your order again and suffer a minor delay in getting your grub.

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But it could be far more dire if such a miscommunication were to occur while giving an emergency dispatcher a street name, or while giving instructions to a pilot making an emergency landing. To prevent such communication errors, agencies, businesses, services, and civilians around the world use the NATO phonetic alphabet.

The NATO phonetic alphabet is the universally adopted spelling alphabet, or code, used to clearly and precisely communicate words or letters both within the same language and across languages. It is important for both speech perception and word recognition, Meghan Sumner, a linguistics professor at Stanford University, tells Popular Mechanics.

“Many sounds are highly confusable within a language,” Sumner says. For example, the sounds “th” and “f” are very similar (thin, fin) and easy to confuse, as are “m” and “n” sounds, she explains. “Especially in contexts that are noisy or when you can’t see the talker,” such as over a radio with background noise or interference. The NATO phonetic alphabet helps avoid ambiguity and makes it clear what the letters are, she says.

In the mid-1950s, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became the first group to approve and use the new alphabet, hence its name. However, several other variations preceded it.

In the 1920s, a special agency of the United Nations, called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), produced the first official version of a phonetic alphabet. This version primarily used names of cities and countries across the globe: Amsterdam, Baltimore, Casablanca, Denmark, and so on. In 1941, the U.S. Army and Navy established the “Able Baker alphabet,” named after the first two code words. The British Royal Air Force adopted the same alphabet two years later.

According to NATO’s history of the phonetic alphabet, these earlier versions were criticized for their English bias because people from non-English speaking countries may be unfamiliar with the words used in those phonetic alphabets, potentially adding to the confusion when trying to communicate.

“Across languages, speakers might hear a sound, but map it onto a different sound category in their own language, especially in contexts of background noise,” Sumner says. For example, the Spanish pronunciation of the letter “P” sounds very similar to the English pronunciation of the letter “B.” This could cause issues when communicating names of people or places to someone who may not be familiar with those names in the other language, she says.

If customer service reps often get the spelling of your name wrong, you can use the NATO phonetic alphabet to fix that. Take a look at the the list below and write out your full first and last name using the codewords that correspond to each letter. Jot it down on a sticky note or in a note on your phone so that you never have to scramble again. Problem = solved.

In response to the criticism that the alphabet was too English-centric, the International Air Transport Association (IATA)—an airline trade association based in Montreal—proposed a new alphabet that only included words with sounds common to English, Spanish, and French. This version came into effect in 1951 for non-military aviation only, and included many of the same words used in today’s NATO phonetic alphabet. But the IATA alphabet at that time was still a little confusing. For example, “C” was “Coca,” and “X” was “eXtra,” which doesn’t even start with “X.”

By the mid-1950s, NATO recognized the need for a singular, universally-adopted phonetic alphabet, so the organization launched a review of the Able Baker alphabet, led by the U.S. and the U.K. As the review dragged on, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began considering a proposal to change the words for four letters in the IATA version (“C,” “M,” “U,” and “X”), and debated over whether or not to change Nectar to November for “N.”

Then in April 1955, NATO jumped in and announced it would be officially adopting the proposed revised IATA alphabet as of January 1, 1956. Just a few months later, the ICAO also approved the revised version, now known as the NATO phonetic alphabet. A few years later, the ITU (the organization first to adopt a phonetic spelling alphabet) also adopted the NATO alphabet, making it the universal phonetic alphabet for all military, civilian, and amateur radio communications.

Not only does the NATO phonetic alphabet aid in communication that is strictly audio (without the assistance of visual aids), but it also helps avoid incorrect word recognition, Sumner says, “and the best example of this is my last name.”

People often read the word “summer” when they see her name, and hear the word “summer” when she says her name. That’s because when we start to read or hear words, our brain activates potential words for us, Sumner explains. Once the wrong word is already activated, it becomes extremely difficult to correct, she says.

Sumner uses a number of tactics to help people get her name correct. “Sometimes, I do nothing and hope,” she says. “But in situations that matter, where getting the letters right is critical, the NATO alphabet helps.”

Correction, March 10, 2022: A previous version of a graphic in this story misspelled the NATO phonetic alphabet entries for “A” and “J.” The correct spellings are “Alfa” and “Juliett.”