Why People Don’t Use the NATO Alphabet

The NATO alphabet is an international standard of communication. That doesn’t stop people from saying ‘N as in Nancy.’

Credit...Janet Mac

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By Sam Corbin

Breakdowns in communication are a tale as old as biblical time. “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other,” reads the story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. “So the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.”

Millenniums into human civilization, we’re no closer to completing the proverbial tower. Though it’s tempting to consider whether things would have gone differently in the Bible if we had been offered a phonetic alphabet instead.

Phonetic alphabets, also known as spelling alphabets, came to prominence on the global stage in the mid-20th century, as world wars made urgent the need for clear, quick and secretive communication among Allied forces. The NATO Alphabet we know today (which begins with Alfa, Bravo, Charlie) was adopted officially in 1956 by the International Civil Aviation Organization, after earlier iterations such as the Able Baker alphabet proved inadequate. In a version used briefly by the British Royal Army, the spelling alphabet begins with Ack, Beer, which is what I say when I realize I’ve shown up empty-handed to a party.

The NATO alphabet remains ubiquitous in ceremony — it comes up often in The New York Times’s crossword entries — but in practice, it’s somewhat niche. When was the last time you clarified the letter “Y” by saying “Yankee” instead of something like “yellow” or “yes”?

This question invites another: Can there ever be a “people’s spelling alphabet” — a word sequence that accurately reflects how these alphabets are used in everyday life? While opinions on which words serve best for spelling alphabets may prove as subjective as our individual relationships to language, there are meaningful patterns to observe.

In the Apple TV+ television series “Severance,” workers are tasked with coding endless data using numbers floating across their computer screens, and are told they will intuit which numbers to file by those that “just look scary.” Likewise, we may simply be drawn to certain words over others because they just look or sound right in our minds.

“I think a lot of it is learned, to be honest,” said Nell Avault, a speech and language pathologist based in Boston. “I mean, our associations we make are with what we most frequently see. Like kids, they learn about apples and fruit, and ‘A is for apple,’ and you know, they wouldn’t say ‘A is for aerodynamic,’ because that’s not a word they’re exposed to.”

Ms. Avault also explained her preference for “Nancy” for the letter N by explaining that she had heard her mother use the word. “She’d spell her name, Annette, and that’s what she would say, so that’s what I say.”

Other language experts take a more despondent approach, pointing at “useless” phonetic alphabets — like one by Prof. James Blustein of Dalhousie University in which A as in Are and P as in Urine — to demonstrate how quickly dialects, contexts and silent letters can snarl an attempt to create something that applies internationally, let alone among U.S. English speakers.

But the exception often proves the rule, and conventions persist among those who use the alphabets most. Standards certainly aren’t going to stop Jerzy Gwiazdowski, a writer and actor who regularly finds himself spelling his 11-letter last name over the phone from using “zebra” to spell out Z’s.

“There’s no denying the desire path of ‘zebra,’ said Mr. Gwiazdowski, “Z is in my first and last name, and I have never used the word ‘Zulu’ to indicate the Z.”

On the receiving end of the line, a customer service representative may find that words are just as elusive.

Natalie Wall, who works in customer service, spends all day on the phone, often reading out confirmation numbers for support tickets or receiving email addresses from disgruntled customers. Ms. Wall has found that she seeks efficiency in the words she favors as a spelling alphabet.

“Words just leave you,” Ms. Wall said. “So you’ll be like, ‘S as in Sam,’ ‘S as in stay,’ ‘S as in stop.’ It’s kind of whatever comes first to mind because I’m trying to make it as painless for them as possible.”

Ms. Wall also professed a preference for the word “octopus” as her go-to “O” word. By way of explanation: “My husband likes octopi.”

The diversity of word associations in modern radio and telephonic communications should not be considered as a means of disparaging the usefulness of the NATO alphabet. Indeed, for soldiers and pilots, the NATO alphabet is both workplace lingua franca and shorthand spelling for coffee shop orders.

“The phonetics are everywhere in the military, particularly in voice communications,” said Robert McKenna, a reserve officer in the U.S. Army. “Everything on radio or telephone is spelled out, designated and coded using NATO.”

Mr. McKenna noted a stark shift in the relevance of the NATO alphabet once he was off the clock.

“On the phone, my parents will always say things like ‘D as in dog,’ but I use ‘D as in delta.’”

Matt Hurley, a pilot for Delta Air Lines, has observed a similar discrepancy. Having learned to fly at 8 years old, he has “defaulted to the phonetic alphabet” since childhood both in and outside of work, but has found that it often creates more confusion than clarity in everyday situations.

“Given my name is Matt, they’ll maybe sometimes think I said ‘Nat,’” Mr. Hurley said. “And then I’ll say, ‘No, like M as in Mike,’ and then they’ll think my name is Mike, and then it just gets even worse.”

Mr. Hurley’s anecdote illuminates a delightfully absurd quality about spelling alphabets: We create words for letters, but then use those words as abbreviations for other phrases. For example, “Lima Charlie,” in military speak, means “loud and clear.”

“It’s funny, there’s this extra degree,” said Mr. Gwiazdowski, whose attempts to clarify his own name have often made him philosophical on the topic. “We give the letters names, and then we have to pronounce the names. We have the symbol for it, name for it, and that name is a word.”

Among this tangle of mnemonic devices, consistency feels like a pipe dream. The idea of a spelling alphabet that unites all languages in phonetic harmony is rather quixotic to begin with since it could only claim to apply to the Roman characters we use for various modern alphabets. But as we grasp at words to spell things out, it helps to know there’s no such thing as a right answer.

“You just need one word, and it doesn’t need to be the best word,” Ms. Avault said. “It just needs to do its job.”

Sam Corbin writes about language, wordplay and the daily crossword for The Times. More about Sam Corbin

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