NATO Phonetic Alphabet Converter
Spell letters with official NATO/ICAO code words and optional radiotelephony digit pronunciations.
The pronunciation option follows ICAO-style spoken number forms.
Literal symbols are preserved, not converted into spoken code words.
Phonetic Output
Output will appear below
NATO/ICAO spelling output will appear here.
“Alfa” and “Juliett” are not typos
The international spelling alphabet deliberately uses Alfa with an f and Juliett with two final t letters. ICAO chose spellings that would be pronounced more consistently across languages, and NATO adopted the same alphabet in 1956. That is why a standards-aligned converter should not silently substitute the everyday English spelling “Alpha.”
NATO publishes the current A–Z sequence and its history on the NATO phonetic alphabet reference.
Official A–Z code words at a glance
The spelling alphabet assigns one code word to each Latin letter. Case does not matter: a and A both become Alfa.
| Letter | Code word | Letter | Code word |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Alfa | N | November |
| B | Bravo | O | Oscar |
| C | Charlie | P | Papa |
| D | Delta | Q | Quebec |
| E | Echo | R | Romeo |
| F | Foxtrot | S | Sierra |
| G | Golf | T | Tango |
| H | Hotel | U | Uniform |
| I | India | V | Victor |
| J | Juliett | W | Whiskey |
| K | Kilo | X | X-ray |
| L | Lima | Y | Yankee |
| M | Mike | Z | Zulu |
Digits have words and radio pronunciations
Digits are not additional NATO alphabet letters. Radiotelephony guidance gives them ordinary written labels such as Three and Nine, but specifies pronunciations such as TREE and NIN-ER to reduce ambiguity over radio. The output selector exposes both forms rather than pretending they are the same thing.
| Digit | Written word | Radiotelephony pronunciation |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Zero | ZE-RO |
| 1 | One | WUN |
| 2 | Two | TOO |
| 3 | Three | TREE |
| 4 | Four | FOW-ER |
| 5 | Five | FIFE |
| 6 | Six | SIX |
| 7 | Seven | SEV-EN |
| 8 | Eight | AIT |
| 9 | Nine | NIN-ER |
The pronunciation forms above match the ICAO phonetics table published in the FAA Air Traffic Control manual.
Written spelling is not a complete radio procedure
The generated line is a character-by-character spelling aid. It does not provide call-sign rules, aviation phraseology, readback requirements, distress procedure, or context-specific number transmission. The slash shown between input words is only a visual separator on this page; do not treat it as prescribed spoken phraseology.
Characters outside A–Z and 0–9 stay outside the standard mapping
Accented letters, non-Latin scripts, punctuation, and emoji do not have code words in the 26-letter NATO/ICAO spelling alphabet. When “keep unsupported characters” is enabled, they remain literal and keep their original Unicode form; they are not uppercased, expanded, or assigned invented pronunciations. Turning the option off removes those literal symbols from the generated line.
Conversion runs in the browser. The page does not need to transmit the entered spelling string to produce the result.