A spelling alphabet is a group of words used to stand for the letters of an alphabet. A spelling alphabet is most often used when you cannot see the person you are communicating with and have no visual cues to rely on when trying to understand the message. This can be especially important over the radio, which can sometimes make it easy to mix up similar sounding letter names, such as “M” and “N”. Each word in the spelling alphabet usually replaces the name of the letter with which it starts. For example, the letter “M” is “Mike” in the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. The NATO Phonetic Alphabet is the most widely-used spelling alphabet, so make sure you are familiar with it, especially for any situation in which you need to communicate over the radio or otherwise cannot see the person you are in communication with:
