NATO phonetic alphabet chart

Letters (A–Z)

Numbers (0–9)

Saying numbers

Numbers are spoken one digit at a time: 17 is one seven and 60 is six zero. Four digits are pronounced differently from everyday English so they survive a noisy channel:

• 3 — tree, so it is not mispronounced sri.
• 4 — fower, rhyming with lower, to keep it apart from for.
• 5 — fife, because five is easily mistaken for fire.
• 9 — niner, with an extra syllable so it cannot be confused with the German nein, meaning no.

Hundred and thousand are used only in some contexts: 1300 is one three zero zero as a transponder code or serial number, but one thousand three hundred as an altitude. A decimal point is decimal (the FAA also uses point).

Why Alfa and Juliett look misspelled

They are the official spellings, not typos. Alfa is written with an f because speakers of many languages would not know that ph sounds like f. Juliett has a double t so French speakers do not treat the final letter as silent. For the same reason NATO writes Xray as one word, while ICAO keeps X-ray. You will still see Alpha and Juliet in everyday use; the pronunciation is the same.

Where the words came from

The International Civil Aviation Organization defined the alphabet in 1955–1956. Each word was chosen after hundreds of thousands of comprehension tests with speakers of 31 nationalities, and the test was not whether a word is understood on its own but whether it is understood among the others — Foxtrot beat more familiar candidates on exactly that measure. The last change came in 1956, when Nectar became November, and the list has been essentially stable since.

It is used wherever letters must survive a bad line: pilots and air traffic control, NATO and other armed forces, and radio amateurs spelling call signs on voice. In Morse none of this is needed — each letter already has its own pattern — which is why the chart above shows both side by side. The translator has a NATO toggle that spells any text alongside its Morse.