Yankee — NATO Phonetic Alphabet for Y

Well over a century before ICAO ever assigned it to the letter Y, "Yankee" was already a nickname for Americans — particularly those from the northeastern United States — popularized further by the Revolutionary War-era song "Yankee Doodle."

Yankee also marks a military time zone: it's the last letter in the sequence running west from Zulu, corresponding to UTC−12, the final zone before the International Date Line in the Pacific.

Its maritime signal flag, hoisted alone, warns nearby vessels "I am dragging my anchor" — a status report that a ship isn't holding position as expected.

Kilo and Oscar aren't the only alphabet words with a submarine of the same name: the Yankee-class, an early Cold War Soviet ballistic-missile submarine design, also takes NATO's reporting name straight from this letter. The word's own history runs the opposite direction politically from that Cold War use — it began as a mild, sometimes mocking term the British and other Europeans used for American colonists, before Americans reclaimed it with pride around the Revolutionary War.