Every letter police spell over the radio uses a code word instead — Bravo instead of B, Sierra instead of S — because plain letters get lost in static, engine noise, and bad signal. This page gives you that whole system on one printable sheet: the full A–Z NATO/ICAO chart with pronunciations, the aviation-style number callouts, and the older name-based alphabet that still survives in some call signs, all free to download.
Download the Chart
Download the Police Phonetic Alphabet Printable Chart (PDF)
One letter-size page, print-ready in black and white or color. No sign-up required.
What’s On the Chart
Unlike most of the codes on this site, the phonetic alphabet is genuinely the same everywhere — used identically by police, aviation, the military, and maritime radio worldwide — so this chart doesn’t need the department-by-department caveats the code charts do. It covers:
- The full A–Z alphabet — Alfa through Zulu, each with its pronunciation spelled out phonetically, so you’re not guessing whether it’s “KEY-loh” or “KIL-oh” for Kilo.
- Number callouts — the aviation-standard pronunciations (Tree, Fife, Niner) built to prevent digits like five and nine from being confused over a bad signal.
- The older name-based alphabet — Adam, Boy, Charles, David — still baked into some department call signs today, most visibly the LAPD’s, even though the same departments use the modern NATO words for spelling.
Two Spellings That Look Like Typos
If you print the chart and immediately think two entries are wrong, they’re not. It’s Alfa, not “Alpha” — the “ph” spelling reads as a P sound in several languages, so it was changed to guarantee an F sound internationally. And it’s Juliett, not “Juliet” — the extra T stops French speakers from treating a single final T as silent. Both are the official, deliberate ICAO spellings, chosen after real testing across languages, not errors that crept into the standard.
Want the Full Explanation?
This page is built to be printed and used, not read start to finish. If you want the deeper story — why the alphabet exists in the first place, the acoustic letter families it was designed to defeat, how it was tested and standardised in the 1950s, and exactly how the older Adam-Boy-Charles alphabet still coexists with the modern one inside a single LAPD transmission — our full guide, Police Phonetic Alphabet Chart A–Z, covers all of it in detail. This page is the printable companion to that one.
For the numbered codes that sit alongside the alphabet on a real radio channel, our police codes complete list and free 10-codes printable chart round out the reference set.
Using Police Code to Explore Further
Police Code is a global police code explorer built for exactly this kind of reference — the phonetic alphabet, the 10-codes, the signals, and the penal codes, all in one searchable place instead of scattered across mismatched charts. The alphabet is one of the few things on this site that doesn’t change by agency or country, which makes it a solid starting point before diving into the parts of police radio that do.