(As those of us of a certain age can remember, pre-digital radio was notoriously subject to static and interference.) Signaling individual letters had of course long been established in the navy, and so spelling alphabets evolved to have a distinct word for each letter. The idea was further developed with the spread of radio technology. This was an early version:Īck Beer C D E F G H I J K L Emma N O Pip Q R Esses Toc U Vic W X Y Z Initial attempts in the British Army in the 19th century simply assigned alternative names to letters that were frequently misheard. Since the military is very interested in communication, and because they often work under auditorially challenging conditions (such as, say, during battle), spelling alphabets have mostly come from the military. Even if you've never been in the military or gotten a radio license or studied flying, you've probably heard people use a spelling alphabet on TV or in a movie.Īs you can imagine, spelling alphabets were developed for precisely the reason I noted - spelling out loud is fraught, what with all the letters that sound similar (e.g., B, E, P, T, D) and the many vagaries of auditory communication. A spelling alphabet consists of words (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, etc.) that represent alphabetic characters. This might be one reason that I've developed an interest in the idea of so-called spelling alphabets (frequently referred to, incorrectly, as phonetic alphabets). Even spelling it out doesn't help - P-O-P-E - and I find myself exaggerating the aspiration on those plosives. "Hope?" This is particularly true over the telephone. My name - Pope - is surprisingly easy to mishear. Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, writes:
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