NATO / ICAO spelling
Spells each letter clearly: CAT → Charlie · Alfa · Tango. Best for names, call signs, serials and noisy calls. It does not represent how “cat” is pronounced.
Phonetic Alphabet Converter
Turn text into NATO radio spelling, explore American English IPA, or decode codewords—without sending your text to a server.
✓ Official NATO/ICAO letter codes✓ Offline English IPA dictionary✓ Copy & export
PHONETIC WORKSPACE
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NATO represents letters. IPA represents spoken sounds. Choose the one you need.
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Use spaces for word breaks. Punctuation and unsupported characters are identified, not invented.
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NATO codewords spell characters; they do not translate the pronunciation of the original word.
QUICK REFERENCE
NATO spelling alphabet
Use standardized codewords to clarify letters over radio or telephone.
Standards detail: The official spellings are Alfa (not Alpha) and Juliett (double t). Digit radio pronunciations vary by procedure; the ICAO option is explicitly labeled.
Two systems. Different jobs.
IPA pronunciation
Represents the sounds of a word: cat → /ˈkæt/. Best for language learners and pronunciation reference. This tool uses a US English lexical dictionary, not a context-aware speech model.
Reverse codewords
Decode Charlie Alfa Tango → CAT. Separate whole words with /. Invalid codewords remain visible so that nothing is silently lost.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the IPA output?
It uses the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, converted from ARPABET to broad General American IPA. Some proper nouns, acronyms, foreign words and newer terms are absent. Dictionary variants may reflect different meanings or accents. Stress and syllable boundaries are approximated, and the converter does not analyze sentence context. Unsupported words appear with a question marker rather than guessed sounds.
Why is an English word marked unsupported?
The tool does not guess pronunciation from spelling. If the exact word is not in its offline dictionary, it marks it unsupported. Try an uninflected form or a conventional spelling.
Can I recover the original text exactly after encoding?
Enable Exact round-trip in Text → NATO. This produces a structured PixelOkay PK-NATO2 sequence recognized by NATO → Text, preserving letter case, whitespace, punctuation, and Unicode. Normal radio spelling remains optimized for human speech rather than byte-for-byte reversibility.
Does NATO conversion translate the sound of a word?
No. NATO spells written letters using fixed codewords. For actual English pronunciation sounds, choose IPA.
Does this work without the internet?
Yes, after the static page and local dictionary asset have loaded or been cached by your browser. No external pronunciation API is called. Run the files from an HTTP server rather than file:// to load ES modules and dictionary assets reliably.
Is my text uploaded or saved?
No. This tool processes text in your browser and does not upload it. No analytics library or user-text history is included in this standalone package. Downloaded files are generated locally; your browser may still keep downloads or page cache.
What languages are supported?
IPA dictionary mode targets US English only. Standard NATO encoding supports unaccented Latin A–Z and digits 0–9; the optional exact format escapes all other characters instead of losing them. Decode mode supports NATO/ICAO codewords and number words.