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> However if your users are speaking aloud you might want a word list representation, “TIDE ITCH SLOW REIN RULE MOT”, like s/key rfc 1751. DO NOT invent your own word lists; there are an infinite number of dragons lying in wait for idioms, homophones

An unfortunate example. That's TIED HITCH SLOE REIGN RULE MOW? With only two parity bits, you can't even be sure this decoding is invalid.

RFC 1751 [0], from which this example comes, doesn't envisage the encoding being used in oral communication. Instead, it makes codes easier the user to "read, remember, and type in".

For oral transmission among professionals, sticking to the 26 upper case letters and relying on the NATO alphabet for encoding is a reasonable choice. Getting codes from untrained users in a lossy oral environment is still an unsolved problem.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1751



It would help if nato alphabet was universally known thing.

Typing something letter by letter in Latin when neither party is a native speaker of English is very much painful almost half the time it happens


My personal experience says that the most commonly understood phonetic alphabet in the US among laypeople is the 1946 ARRL alphabet using American first and last names, for example A as in Adam, N as in Nancy. NATO phonetic alphabet confuses almost everyone I've tried it on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_alphabet


Everyone I've run into in the hospitality industry gets NATO phonetic. Hotels and airlines, in my experience, but I assume it generalizes.

My wife thought it was crazy the first time she heard me use it. Then she realized that they all understand it too.


Not to mention accents.

Some people are going to sound like they’re saying Todd for Tide, and have you heard how Baltimore pronounces Iron?




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