NATO phonetic alphabet

The NATO phonetic alphabet is a set of code words for the letters of the Latin alphabet. They are used to spell words when people speak over the radio or telephone, when people from different countries are speaking with different accents, or in other situations where people may not clearly hear the normal names of the letters. This is important for accuracy in the military and in air travel and shipping. For instance, it may be difficult to hear whether a person is saying the letter "pee" (P) or "bee" (B). The NATO code words "papa" and "bravo" are much clearer. (Each code word begins with the letter that it stands for.)

Although it is commonly called a "phonetic alphabet", it is not used for phonetics as the International Phonetic Alphabet is. For this reason it is also called a "spelling alphabet". There have been many different spelling alphabets over time, but the NATO alphabet is the most commonly used around the world.

Between ships at sea, signal flags are used to stand for letters in order to spell out words.