NATO Phonetic Alphabet
Spell any text in the NATO/ICAO alphabet — Alfa, Bravo, Charlie… — with ICAO digit pronunciations, capitals marked, punctuation named; decode spelled words too.
The spelling, one word per line or in a single line, each character paired with its code word, the letter count, and the characters (or words) it could not place.
Example: Hello 42 → Hotel Echo Lima Lima Oscar / Four Two — or Fow-er Too in ICAO pronunciation; "capital hotel echo lima lima oscar space fow-er too" decodes to Hello 42.
Alfa to Zulu,
as the ICAO spells it.
Which words are used, how digits and punctuation are handled, and what decoding accepts.
The alphabet
The ICAO radiotelephony spelling alphabet (Annex 10, Volume II), also used by NATO, the ITU and most emergency services: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. The ICAO spellings Alfa and Juliett are used so that French and Spanish speakers pronounce them correctly.
Digits and punctuation
Digits are spelled as plain words by default; switch on the ICAO pronunciations for radio use — Wun, Too, Tree, Fow-er, Fife, Six, Sev-en, Ait, Nin-er, Zee-ro — which were chosen to survive noisy channels. Punctuation is named in plain words (Stop, Comma, Dash, Slash, At). Accents are stripped to the base letter (é → Echo); other characters are listed as unplaced. With "capital" switched on each upper-case letter is announced as such.
Decoding
Each word is looked up ignoring case, hyphens and spaces, and the usual variants are accepted: Alpha, Juliet, Xray, Niner, Nine, Four and Fower. "Space" inserts a space, "capital" capitalises the next letter. Unknown words are skipped and listed. Nothing leaves the browser; the same four anonymous usage counts as the rest of the site apply.
SOURCES
- ICAO Annex 10, Volume II, radiotelephony spelling alphabet (Alfa … Zulu, Juliett, X-ray) and figure pronunciations (Wun, Too, Tree, Fow-er, Fife, Six, Sev-en, Ait, Nin-er, Zee-ro); ITU-R M.1677-1
Last reviewed 22 September 2026. How results are checked: How we verify.