The only one I don’t like is Z is for Zulu. I’ve never heard of that word before and it could easily be mistaken for Hulu. Z should be changed to Zebra.
Zebra is written with S in some languages, so it would potentially cause trouble.
Zulu could have been different, but has “no” (read:minimized) risk of being mistaken for hulu because hulu is not part of the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet is standardized because it must be, you can find rhymes for any one of these words. No list could be reasonably constructed that wouldn’t. Therefore the only reasonable choice is a standardized list that is designed to not self rhyme.
Zebra is much closer to Sierra and Papa, than Zulu is to any other word in that list - they are specifically chosen to be distinctly understandable in difficult-to-hear situations. And should they change it every time a new brand gets popular that’s kinda similar to one of the words?
Unfortunately that has overlap with Echo.
Ideally, these words are distinct even when most of the audio data is missing (as tends to happen with very bad connections/dropped packets). Worst case is only the “vocal” sounds coming through, as those are very common. Some people pronounce “zero” similarly to how “echo” is pronounced. “Zulu” has no such overlap.
