NATO Phonetic Alphabet Translator

Which exact words does the tool use?

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu, with Zero, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight and Niner for digits. These are the widely used spellings. ICAO’s own published spellings for the first and tenth letters are “Alfa” and “Juliett”, so check which form your organisation expects.

Why is 9 “Niner” but 3 is “Three”?

That is how the tool’s table is written: only nine is respelled. In spoken aviation English, other digits also have special pronunciations, for instance “tree” for 3, “fower” for 4 and “fife” for 5, but the tool prints plain spellings and does not mark pronunciation. Say the digits the way your radio procedure requires.

What happens to punctuation, accented letters and symbols?

There are no words for them. Each unsupported character is printed as the character in square brackets, for example [-] or [É], and the output does not warn you separately. Letters are converted to capitals first, so “é” becomes “É” and is not mapped to E. Spell hyphens, @ signs and full stops aloud as words yourself (“dash”, “at”, “stop”).

How are spaces and line breaks treated?

Any run of spaces, tabs or line breaks counts as one gap. In full mode the gap is printed as [SPACE], in compact mode it is a blank line, and in words-only mode spaces are dropped, so the words of a phrase run together in one comma-separated list. Use compact or full mode if you need to see where words end.

What do the three output formats look like?

Full prints one line per character as “K = Kilo”. Compact prints “K → Kilo”, with a blank line at each space. Words-only prints a single comma-separated line such as “Kilo, X-ray, Three, Four, Papa, Whiskey”. All three then add the same A to Z reference list, printed two to a row.

Does it convert spoken words back into letters?

No. It goes one way only, from text to code words. It also does not check whether your text is a valid registration, postcode or reference number, and it does not add pauses, prowords or emphasis.

Is there a limit on how much text I can enter?

The code sets no limit; every character becomes a line. For very long strings the output is long as well. Using words-only format gives the most compact version, and you can copy it into a message or call script.