NATO Phonetic Alphabet Translator

The tool spells each letter and digit with its code word and keeps your words apart.

1. Type or paste your text into the Input box.
2. Set Mode to Text to NATO words or NATO words to text.
3. Choose how to Separate words with: Slash, New line or Space (three spaces).
4. Read the result. Letters within a word are separated by single spaces.
5. Press Copy, Download .txt or Use as input.

When decoding, mark word breaks with a slash, a new line or at least two spaces. Without a break, every code word joins into one word, which is a common surprise when you paste a sentence of code words with single spaces, so Hotel India Tango Hotel Echo Romeo Echo reads HITHERE. Capitalisation is ignored, and the variants Alpha, Juliet, X-ray and Nine are recognised alongside the official spellings. Words that are not code words are dropped without warning.

The 26 letters are Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, Xray, Yankee and Zulu. Alfa and Juliett are the official spellings, chosen so that speakers of other languages pronounce them correctly. Digits become Zero, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight and Niner. A full stop is written Stop and a hyphen Dash. The official list covers letters and digits, so Stop and Dash are conveniences this tool adds. Other symbols, such as commas and at signs, pass through unchanged. The tool writes only the spelling; the radio pronunciations tree, fower and fife for 3, 4 and 5 are for you to say.

Worked example: Hi there 42-A. becomes Hotel India / Tango Hotel Echo Romeo Echo / Four Two Dash Alfa Stop. A postcode such as SW1A 1AA becomes Sierra Whiskey One Alfa / One Alfa Alfa, and a registration such as AB12 CDE becomes Alfa Bravo One Two / Charlie Delta Echo.

The aim is to remove doubt, and it is worth deciding in advance how much to spell. A short reference such as a surname usually needs only its awkward letters; a long account number or a password needs every character. Say the code words at an even pace and pause after each group so the listener can write them down. Letters such as B, D, P, T and V sound alike on a poor line, as do M and N, and code words that are distinct for English, French and Spanish speakers fix that. Strictly it is a spelling alphabet rather than a phonetic one. The International Civil Aviation Organization adopted the current list in 1956, and it is now used in aviation, shipping, emergency services and customer support.

You rarely need to spell every letter. Read the whole reference, then use code words only for the characters you expect to be misheard. For passwords, remember that this tool ignores case, so say capital or lower case yourself; the strong password generator makes values worth reading out. If you would rather hear letter names such as aitch and eye, use the phonetic spelling generator.

Only the letters A to Z and the digits 0 to 9 are spelled, so an accented letter such as é passes through as it is. Local police and military alphabets with names like Adam, Boy and Charles are not included. Input line breaks are treated as spaces, so a multi-line list becomes one run of words unless you choose the New line separator, which places a break between words only. The tool does not speak the result, so practise saying it aloud, and it is unrelated to the International Phonetic Alphabet used in dictionaries. For another radio-era code, try the Morse code translator.