One of the things we studied in class when preparing to get our amateur radio licenses was the ITU phonetic alphabet.  This is also the same alphabet used by the US armed forces. 
In order to keep in practice, I’ve taken to using it to recite the letters I see on license plates of the other cars I see while I’m driving. 

As a side note, I’ve learned that our local police department uses a completely different phonetic system.  During our session on dispatch operations we were given a copy of it.  I’m curious as to why the police use a different system, though.  Perhaps it’s just inertia, but you’d think they would move to an international standard, especially now that so much attention is being paid to cross-department and cross-jurisdictional operations due to homeland security situations.