Some of you must be familiar, at least vaguely, with phonetic alphabets. The various worlds militaries have developed different variations for disambiguating radio conversations, where each word’s pronounciation is very distinct from the others in the list. NATO’s standard is probably the most widely used and is well known via the media: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, etc. We civilians often require a similar system (completely unstandardized and up to the individual, unfortunately) for spelling words over the phone, i.e. “G as in girl, R as in run, A as in apple, H as in hockey, ...” So {Kimsal} at work had a funny idea: make the most confusing phonetic alphabet possible. His classic examples were K as in knife and P as in pneumatic.

So he and I went about filling out his list. There are some really great ones and some fairly weak ones. The best ones send you in the completely wrong direction. Imagine hearing someone say, “That’s A as in i, E as in ate, G as in naw, S as in c, T as in dow, W as in y, Q as in k, Y as in u”. How confused would you be? I love it! My apologies in advance to any call center workers or other customer service reps. Find my version of the complete list below…

a as in aisle or aye
b as in bdellium (pronounced dell-ee-um)
c as in czar
d as in djibouti (pronounced ja-boo-tee)
e as in eight, eye, or ewe
f as in fjord (this one is pretty weak because it still starts with an ‘eff’ sound)
g as in gnaw
h as in herb
i as in Ioan (Welsh name pronounced yo-an)
j as in jalepeno
k as in knife
l as in llano (Double-L in Spanish becomes y, don’t yano?)
m as in mnemonic
n as in ngwee (pronounced uh-nug-gwee)
o as in oestrogen
p as in pneumatic
q as in queue or quay (pronounced kay)
r as in trademark ® (sorta weak)
s as in sea
t as in tao (pronounced dow)
u as in uakari (pronounced waa-car-ee)
v as in Five (as in the roman numeral five – not great but still confusing)
w as in wrench or why
x as in xenon
y as in you (or yttrium, pronounced ee-tree-um)
z as in UTC (weak and majorly geeky, UTC is also known as Zulu, hence the abbreviation Z)