Spelling out one's name, a password or a ticker symbol over the telephone are other scenarios where a spelling alphabet is useful.īritish Army signallers began using a partial spelling alphabet in the late 19th century.

Without these visual cues, such as during announcements of airline gate numbers 'B1' and 'D1' at an airport, 'B' may be confused with 'D' by the listener. For example, lips are closed at the start of saying the letter 'B' but open at the beginning of the letter 'D' making these otherwise similar-sounding letters more easily discriminated when looking at the speaker. Also, the lack of visual cues during oral communication can cause confusion. The lack of high frequencies on standard telephones makes it hard to distinguish an 'F' from an 'S' for example. It is used to spell out words when speaking to someone not able to see the speaker, or when the audio channel is not clear. Should an efficient American secretary, for example, know several alphabets-one for use on the telephone, another to talk to the telegraph operator, another to call the police, and still another for civil defense? Įach word in the spelling alphabet typically replaces the name of the letter with which it starts ( acrophony). Often, each communications company and each branch of each country's military developed its own spelling alphabet, with the result that one 1959 research effort documented a full 203 different spelling alphabets, comprising 1600 different words, leading the author of the report to ask:

These can be difficult to discriminate, particularly over a limited-bandwidth and noisy communications channel, hence the use in aviation and by armed services of unambiguous substitute names for use in electrical voice communication such as telephone and radio.Ī large number of spelling alphabets have been developed over the past century, with the first ones being used to overcome problems with the early wired telephone networks, and the later ones being focused on wireless two-way radio (radiotelephony) links.

The names of the letters of the English alphabet are 'a', 'bee', 'cee', 'dee', 'e', etc. A spelling alphabet is also often called a phonetic alphabet, especially by amateur radio enthusiasts, recreational sailors in the US and Australia, and NATO military organizations, despite this usage of the term producing a naming collision with the usage of the same phrase in phonetics to mean a notation used for phonetic transcription or phonetic spelling, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is used to indicate the sounds of human speech. These synonyms include spelling alphabet, word-spelling alphabet, voice procedure alphabet, radio alphabet, radiotelephony alphabet, telephone alphabet, and telephony alphabet. Spelling alphabets are called by various names, according to context. Spelling alphabets also exist for Greek and for Russian. Today the most widely known spelling alphabet is the ICAO International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, also known as the NATO phonetic alphabet, which is used for Roman letters.

International air travel created a need for a worldwide standard. Many (loosely or strictly) standardized spelling alphabets exist, mostly owing to historical siloization, where each organization simply created its own. However, to gain the advantages of standardization in contexts involving trained persons, a standard version can be convened by an organization. For example, it is common to hear a nonce form like 'A as in 'apple', D as in 'dog', P as in 'paper'' over the telephone in customer support contexts. For example, in the Latin alphabet, the letters B, P, and D ('bee', 'pee' and 'dee') sound similar and could easily be confused, but the words 'bravo', 'papa' and 'delta' sound completely different, making confusion unlikely.Īny suitable words can be used in the moment, making this form of communication easy even for people not trained on any particular standardized spelling alphabet. This avoids any confusion that could easily otherwise result from the names of letters that sound similar, except for some small difference easily missed or easily degraded by the imperfect sound quality of the apparatus. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them. A spelling alphabet ( also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone.

English alphabet spelling pdf