Police phonetic alphabet
UNIT becomes Union Nora Ida Tom in the police phonetic alphabet, the Adam, Boy, Charlie list used by North American dispatch. Spell plates, names and unit numbers for the radio, or turn a string of code words back into letters. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Text
- UNIT
- Result
- Union Nora Ida Tom
- Calculation mode
- Encode
- Quantity
- 4
- Alphabet
- police_apco
The APCO police phonetic alphabet is the public-safety voice spelling table long used by North American law enforcement, fire, and emergency dispatch so that unit identifiers, license plates, names, and short codes can be read over the radio without letter-for-letter confusion. Adam stands for A, Boy for B, Charlie for C, David for D, and the rest of the list—Edward, Frank, George, Henry, Ida, John, King, Lincoln, Mary, Nora, Ocean, Paul, Queen, Robert, Sam, Tom, Union, Victor, William, X-ray, Young, Zebra—is the classic street-side counterpart to the aviation NATO Alpha Bravo Charlie standard. This capability spells plain text into those police code words or decodes a paste of code words back into letters and digits, with a simple encode or decode mode and a hard error that reports any unknown word by name.
Spell text with police phonetic code words (encode mode)
Each Latin letter A through Z maps to its classic APCO-style police code word—Adam for A, Boy for B, Charlie for C, David for D, Edward for E, Frank for F, George for G, Henry for H, Ida for I, John for J, King for K, Lincoln for L, Mary for M, Nora for N, Ocean for O, Paul for P, Queen for Q, Robert for R, Sam for S, Tom for T, Union for U, Victor for V, William for W, X-ray for X, Young for Y, and Zebra for Z—using the public-safety spellings with a hyphen kept on X-ray so tokenization stays stable.
Digits zero through nine map to Zero, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine; letter Z is Zebra so digit zero can safely use Zero without colliding on a round-trip. Whitespace in the input separates word groups: letters inside a group are joined with single spaces, and groups are joined with a slash surrounded by spaces so Hi unit becomes Henry Ida slash Union Nora Ida Tom. Empty text with no letters or digits also fails validation.
Identical inputs always produce identical outputs because the path is pure table lookup with no network, no random salt, and no wall clock. Use encode whenever you need a paste-ready police spelling for training sheets, radio-check drills, museum labels, CAD demos, or short identifiers that must be read aloud in the Adam Boy Charlie style.
Decode code words and report unknown words
Set mode to decode and put a sequence of APCO police phonetic code words in text, separated by spaces. Optional slash markers between groups are ignored so you can round-trip the encode output without stripping separators by hand. Matching is case-insensitive and treats hyphens, underscores, and internal spaces as equivalent, so X-ray, xray, and X Ray all decode to X.
Canonical letter words and digit words resolve to uppercase letters and digit characters; common public-safety alternates such as Charles for Charlie and Nought, Naught, or Oh for Zero are accepted so real-world pastes from older manuals still work. Empty decode input fails the same way.
Prefer this capability when search intent is police phonetic alphabet, Adam Boy Charlie converter, APCO spelling alphabet, or law-enforcement voice spelling; modern aviation Alpha Bravo Charlie work belongs to the separate NATO phonetic tools, and historical telegraph Adams Boston Chicago belongs to the Western Union capability.
How to use it and its practical limits
Call the free in-browser police phonetic alphabet tool for academy demos, dispatcher training nights, classroom public-safety communications labs, museum kiosks on radio history, and one-off spell-checks of short identifiers without installing a spreadsheet of code words. A typical workflow encodes a short unit or plate string in police style for an agent to read over the radio, pastes the spoken words into a ticket, then decodes on the receiving system and asserts that result matches the original letters.
Another workflow decodes student answers in a radio-procedure quiz and fails loud on unknown code words so instructors see the exact typo. Authors shipping SDKs can map the tokens array into a table of character and code columns for UI copy buttons, while mode and alphabet labels make OpenAPI examples self-explanatory for readers comparing police APCO and NATO radio spelling styles.
What you can do with it
Dispatcher and academy radio drills
Instructors spell plate and unit IDs as Adam Boy Charlie so trainees hear the classic police table, then decode the read-back to verify the original letters.
Help desk with public-safety spelling style
Agents who work with law-enforcement partners spell serial numbers over the phone and decode customer read-backs, failing loud on unknown code words before closing the ticket.
FAQ
How do I spell text with the police phonetic alphabet?
The result field returns Union Nora Ida Tom with a tokens list for each character.
How do I decode Adam Boy Charlie back to letters?
Set mode to decode and put space-separated police phonetic code words in text. The result field returns the recovered uppercase letters and digits.
How is this different from the NATO phonetic alphabet?
Police/APCO uses Adam, Boy, Charlie, David and other public-safety words. NATO/ICAO uses Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. They are different tables and different search intents; use the matching capability for each.
How are spaces between words spelled?
Each word becomes its own group and the groups are joined with a slash, so Hi unit becomes Henry Ida / Union Nora Ida Tom. When you decode, the slashes are ignored, so the result can be pasted straight back.
How are digits spelled in the police alphabet?
Digits use their plain names, from Zero to Nine. Because the letter Z is Zebra, Zero never collides with a letter, and a spelled code always decodes back to the same characters.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/enc/police-phonetic \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"text":"UNIT"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/enc/police-phonetic", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"text": "UNIT"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/enc/police-phonetic",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"text": "UNIT"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/enc/police-phonetic", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"text":"UNIT"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"text":"UNIT"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/enc/police-phonetic", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"text": "UNIT"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "enc.police_phonetic",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
The algorithm is a fixed deterministic table: no model, no network, and no clock, so the same input always yields the same JSON for tests and SDKs.
Spell text with police phonetic code words (encode mode)
Send a JSON body with the required string field text set to the letters and digits you want to spell, and leave mode at its default encode or set mode to encode explicitly. Characters outside letters, digits, and whitespace raise invalid_input with the offending character and index, so punctuation does not silently drop out of a plate or badge check. Aliases input, value, and s are accepted for the text field; direction, op, and action may stand in for mode. The response includes result as the spelled phrase, tokens as an array of char and code pairs, count as the number of mapped characters, mode equal to encode, and alphabet equal to police_apco.
Decode code words and report unknown words
Any token that is not a known code word raises invalid_input with an explicit unknown code word message that names the bad token—exactly the contract training tools and radio-check pipelines need when a typo would otherwise invent a wrong letter. That is how this capability reports unknown words: they surface in the error payload instead of being skipped. On success the response returns result as the recovered string, tokens pairing each resolved character with its canonical code word, count, mode decode, and alphabet police_apco. Validation failures are not charged on the prepaid API, so operators can probe bad pastes safely.
API usage, pricing, workflows, and practical limits
Use the prepaid KIT API when a support backend, education quiz, logistics label printer, or SDK needs the same encode or decode step under balance at $0.002 per successful item; failed validation never consumes balance after the engine rejects the request. Pair this endpoint with uppercase or transliteration tools when identifiers arrive in mixed scripts, but keep the steps separate so each landing page matches a single search intent.
Integration use cases
CI fixtures for identifier pipelines
Services that generate spoken identifiers in police phonetic style pin encode and decode goldens—including an unknown-word error—so table drift is caught in continuous integration.
Technical questions
What happens on an unknown code word?
Decode raises invalid_input naming the unknown code word so the bad token is reported explicitly. Validation failures are not charged on the prepaid API.
Is the police phonetic alphabet tool free?
The browser widget runs free on your device. API calls use prepaid KIT balance at $0.002 per successful item.