The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet

The Wizard works in Technical Support over the phone, so I get to use this resource everyday. The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the NATO phonetic alphabet, NATO spelling alphabet, ICAO phonetic alphabet or ICAO spelling alphabet, is the most widely used radiotelephone spelling alphabet.

To create the code, a series of international agencies assigned 26 code words acrophonically to the letters of the English alphabet, so that the names for letters and numbers would be distinct enough to be easily understood by those who exchanged voice messages by radio or telephone, regardless of language differences or the quality of the connection. The specific code words varied, as some seemingly distinct words were found to be ineffective in real-life conditions. In 1956, NATO modified the then-current set of code words used by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO); this modification then became the international standard when it was accepted by the ICAO that year and by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) a few years later. The words were chosen to be accessible to speakers of French and Spanish in addition to English; the spellings of a couple code words were changed to facilitate their use.