•-•• Military Phonetic Alphabet

A phonetic alphabet is a list of words used to identify letters in a message transmitted by radio or telephone. Spoken words from an approved list are substituted for letters. For example, the word "Army" would be "Alfa Romeo Mike Yankee" when spelled in the phonetic alphabet. This practice helps to prevent confusion between similar sounding letters, such as "m" and "n", and to clarify communications that may be garbled during transmission.

An early version of the phonetic alphabet appears in the 1913 edition of The Bluejackets’ Manual. Found in the Signals section, it was paired with the Alphabetical Code Flags defined in the International Code. Both the meanings of the flags (the letter which they represent) and their names (which make up the phonetic alphabet) were selected by international agreement. Later editions included the Morse code signal as well. Morse code is transmitted with a series of dots and dashes. The last column is Morse code.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

Alpha

Bravo

Charlie

Delta

Echo

Foxtrot

Golf

Hotel

India

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T
U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Juliet

Kilo

Lima

Mike

November

Oscar

Papa

Quebec

Romeo

Sierra

Tango

Uniform

Victor

Whiskey

X-Ray

Yankee

Zulu

The words chosen to represent some letters have changed since the phonetic alphabet was introduced. When these changes occur, they are made by international agreement. The current phonetic alphabet was adopted in 1957.

The Phonetic Alphabet is in use by all branches of the U.S. Military, and Nato Forces

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Military Phonetic Alphabet.pdf