Lima — NATO Phonetic Alphabet for L

Say Lima the way ICAO intends — "LEE-mah," after the Peruvian capital — and it's an easy, recognizable word across most of the world. Say it "LYE-mah," the pronunciation of the unrelated city of Lima, Ohio, and you've got the wrong Lima entirely.

That shared spelling has caused real practical friction in one specific place: in Indonesian and Malay, "lima" is the ordinary word for the number five, which creates genuine potential for confusion in local radio and aviation use, and Indonesia has been known to substitute a different word, such as "London," for the letter L rather than risk the clash.

Its maritime signal flag, hoisted by itself, carries one of the more serious meanings in the system: "stop your vessel instantly," historically tied to quarantine signaling at sea.

Lima is pronounced essentially the same way in Spanish, English and Portuguese alike, which is part of why the Indonesian clash reads as the exception rather than the rule — a rare case of an alphabet word that works cleanly across most of the world but genuinely needed a local workaround in one specific language community.