A male is a ‘mike’. We use letters selected from a standard phonetic, or spelling, alphabet so nobody fumbles for words. Spelling alphabets came about because early users of radios ...

While you might think people are just picking random words—and indeed some might be—there is actually a defined military phonetic alphabet that was established over the first half of the 1900s ...

The closest you might find is in words such as ‘tchórz’ (coward) – though even then, there’s a pesky ‘C’ separating the two, not to mention a different pronunciation! To round out our phonetic journey ...