How to play
- Press Start. You have 3 minutes for all 26.
- Type an answer, in any order. It counts as soon as it matches, with no need to press Enter, and fills in its row.
- Pause whenever you like; the list is hidden while the clock is stopped. If you leave mid-game, it waits, paused, until you come back.
- When the time is up, the ones you missed fill in, marked as missed.
About the NATO phonetic alphabet
Its proper name is the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. It came into use for aviation in 1956, and NATO and most radio operators have used it since. Each word was chosen so that speakers of English, French and Spanish would understand it over a bad line, and so that no two words would be mistaken for each other.
More facts (names some answers)
Two words are spelled unusually on purpose: Alfa, so that speakers who don’t read ph as F say it right, and Juliett, so that French speakers don’t treat the final T as silent. Digits have radio pronunciations too, such as “niner” for nine and “tree” for three. Not every word is the one people guess: Charlie, Foxtrot and X-ray are often swapped for other words in everyday speech.
What counts
This is the alphabet of the International Civil Aviation Organization. Its official spellings count, and so do the everyday English spellings of the two words it spells unusually.
Capitals, accents, spaces and punctuation don’t matter, but the spelling does.
The accepted alternative forms appear here when your quiz ends, so they don’t give any answers away.
| Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|
| Alfa | Alpha |
| Juliett | Juliet |
| Whiskey | Whisky |
| X-ray | Xray |
Questions
Why is it called the NATO alphabet?
NATO adopted it soon after the aviation world did, and its use by the military made the name stick, although the alphabet belongs to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
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