Soon after the code words were developed by ICAO (see history below), they were adopted by other national and international organizations, including the ITU, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), … See more

A spelling alphabet is used to distinguish those parts of a message that contain letters and digits, because the names of many letters sound similar, for instance bee and pee, en and em or ef and ess. The potential for confusion increases if static … See more

The final choice of code words for the letters of the alphabet and for the digits was made after hundreds of thousands of comprehension tests involving 31 nationalities. The qualifying feature was the likelihood of a code word being understood in the … See more

Prior to World War I and the development and widespread adoption of two-way radio that supported voice, telephone spelling alphabets were developed to improve communication on low-quality and long-distance telephone circuits.
The first non … See more

Since "Nectar" was changed to "November" in 1956, the code has been mostly stable. However, there is occasional regional substitution of a few code words, such as replacing them with earlier variants, to avoid confusion with local terminology. See more

• Allied military phonetic spelling alphabets
• APCO radiotelephony spelling alphabet (used by some US police departments)
• International Code of Signals
• Language-specific spelling alphabets See more

• "The Postal History of ICAO: Annex 10 - Aeronautical Telecommunications". ICAO. Archived from the original on 12 February 2019. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
• "NATO Declassified – The NATO Phonetic Alphabet". North Atlantic Treaty Organization. See more