A long time ago in a country far, far away (France), I stumbled upon a collection of spelling alphabets from around the world. A spelling alphabet (or acrophonic alphabet) is a set of words that are used in place of letters when spelling phrases out loud: think alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, etc.

When I found this collection, I immediately set about the task of creating a little web application to play with the alphabets. Unfortunately, though, the project fell by the wayside and has spent years shelved among numerous other projects that I’m still interested in but haven’t taken the time to finish.

Well, today I’m happy to announce that I’ve taken Acrophonics back off the shelf and cleaned it up a bit. For the technicallly curious, I’ve rewritten it in Sinatra (originally it was in Rails) and deployed it on Heroku. It also has a nice little JSON API.

Go check it out and try some phrases of your own at acrophonics.heroku.com. Please give feedback here or post any issues you find on the project’s github page.