In English, there are several ways to say letters of the alphabet over the phone to spell a word:
"A as in Alpha", "B as in Bravo" and so on.
Something similar is used in Chinese to spell names:
"麗 lì, 美麗 měilì de 麗 lì"
"賞 shǎng, 欣賞 xīnshǎng de 賞 shǎng"

Is there a list somewhere of these "canonical words" used for spelling? It might be a nice study aid.

Wikipedia has examples of such "telephone alphabets" for various European languages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_alphabet
The Chinese Wikipedia page has such a table... but it's only for Japanese kana!
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%80%9A%E8%AF%9D%E8%A1%A8

Similar question: How about "spelling" Chinese people's names? E.g, "its the x character from x,y"

They will say _ _ 的 _.

Example being, 工作的工, as a very easy example.

Edit: That is the answer to both of your questions. If it is a pronunciation that has a lot of characters, they will reference it by saying a word it appears in.

I don't think there is a list of canonical words

@paddy665 yeah I imagine there isn't a formal list. But one could constitute one, maybe by extraction from a large enough corpus...

To be honest I am always amazed in English that people can rattle off "A as in Apple, V as in Victor, ...". I'm always struggling, searching, then coming up with weird words: "A as in ... Aardvark? V as in ... Vivisection? ..."

But I was working in Shanghai next to a secretary making a lot of calls, and she was always spelling things out in this manner, without breaking her stride "美麗的麗, etc". I kept thinking I should take notes :-)

@seant018 I understand the technique, I am just wondering if there is a way to get a list of the words that are typically used to do this.

From my experience, they use the easiest/most common example. I could ask some of my coworkers for you, but I think they will agree that they just think of the easiest, most simple example.

To answer your question, they don't have a list, at least not here in Taiwan. They just come up with an example that answers the question.

This could be generated from a character and word frequency list with a few minutes programming- you could try one if those sites when you can pay people to write code for you if you can't do it yourself.

I don't know about doing this in Chinese, but if you want to max out your panache with English, download and run through the shared Anki deck "NATO Phonetic Alphabet".

@alanmd I'd be interested in the words people actually use, which is different from the most frequent words.

For example, I just calculated the list of the most frequent words for English. It's interesting but almost entirely unlike what people would actually use:

A as in and
B as in be
C as in can
D as in do
E as in even
F as in for
G as in get
H as in he
I as in in
J as in just
K as in know
L as in like
M as in more
N as in not
O as in of
P as in people
Q as in question
R as in right
S as in she
T as in the
U as in up
V as in very
W as in was
X as in x-ray
Y as in you
Z as in zone

by the way the "few minutes of programming" ended up being more like an hour for me :-) but that includes finding the word frequency lists:
http://www.insightin.com/esl/
http://www.wordfrequency.info/ (better)

@nick thanks I downloaded it, hopefully soon my slight English phone spelling handicap will be remedied!

I don't think I've ever heard any of those! (Maybe x-ray!)

The ones the military use for English, although not actually compulsory or standard, are based on being the least able to be mis-heard, so maybe that's the same logic in Chinese - people choose a word that is unlikely to include a homophone, making the character more identifiable. Unhelpfully for us beginners, this makes it more likely to be a rare word...!

@Seant018 I'd be grateful if you asked your coworkers, but I'd understand if you didn't, as they may think it's a strange question, and one is allowed to ask only so many of those :-)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but wouldn't such a list be so obscenely long as to be unusable? The list would need an entry for every character in Chinese.

@Dependable Skeleton
Yeah, considering how variable it is in English... for a language that doesn't actually 'spell' like Chinese, it seems impossible! Pretty any time I've heard it they just choose the most unique/identifiable word they can think of.

I´m a professional (ex) ship/coastal radio station "Sparks". The international set is very thoroughly thought, so I very strongly recommend it (Alfa Bravo Charlie etc). They limit very well any misunderstandings. As a curiosity, I sailed both Oscar Golf Whiskey Tango and Oscar Golf Whiskey Foxtrot, mostly sober, at times dancing. Well, this a bit off-topic, it´s a bit more complicated for Chinese.

@Kai An hour is about the standard result from a programmer's estimate of "a few minutes" :)

I didn't say it would work for Latin alphabet letters in English- that was your idea; the jump from hanzi to Latin letters is also a bit of an odd one to make. Your matches should probably exclude all the little junk words we have in English like particles and pronouns, then you might get something more convincingly human-like.

If you were going to implement this algorithmically in Chinese, you should look for the most common multi-character word that has no homophones or multiple spellings, perhaps restricting it to nouns (which is part of what the NATO phonetic alphabet gives you in English).

Unfortunately I doubt that most people would bother building a list like this; it can never be 'canonical'. Perhaps an online survey would be your best bet, looking for the words that people use most often to clarify their actual names?

@Dependable Skeleton yes it would be a long list, but I would find it useful as a standard context to use. I find it's difficult to remember a character in isolation, much easier to remember (especially tone) within a word, so I make my own list. For example, I still confuse shíhou de hòu 候 with yǐhòu de hòu 後/后.

@alanmd online survey is an interesting idea (but how to get people to do fill in such a thing, maybe as a game...). In German there's a DIN standard, apparently for Japanese kana there is a standard... Maybe there is not enough need for this in Chinese, which of course would be 100 times longer. But surely homophones are a big problem in spoken Chinese communication.

One reason why it would be hard to standardize is it can be pretty contextual. For example people will use a famous person's name as an example of a character: 郭台銘的郭 (for Foxconn founder Guo Tai-ming / Terry Gou).

@Kai, I went ahead and asked the coworkers, every single one of them haha. All of them said pretty much the same thing, if someone asks them how to write a character, they will come up with an example by themselves. This is all at a school though, so the person usually asking how to write is a student, which means you either have to come up with the easiest word that uses that character (which the other students are usually more helpful with), actually write the character, or break it down by it's radicals, for example the will say 一個女一個力 etc.., which then might prompt the other person to ask "where is the 力?" Obviously breaking it down like that takes a lot more time then simply writing it for them or telling them where they can see it.

Once again, aside from making restaurant reservations, I see this almost completely in a classroom setting, which is completely different than how you are asking, but I would figure aside from actually writing it for them, they same basic concept will still apply.

I hope this helps you some, and if you have any more questions you would want me to ask my coworkers, go ahead and tell me, I don't mind at all.

i found the official spelling-list for NATO here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchstabiertafel

ITU/ICAO/NATO

Alfa
Alfa-Echo
Bravo
Charlie
Charlie-Hotel
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliett
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Oscar-Echo
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
–
Sierra-Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Uniform-Echo
Victor
Whiskey
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu

there is no official list for chinese. its a non-alphabetical language.

Thank you for asking @Seant018! I'll keep looking and maybe make my own list.

off-topic but found when searching for "chinese over the phone word character" and a bit like what @Seant018 mentioned, a quiz based on playful descriptions of Chinese characters, in the style of solving Chinese Lantern riddles (猜燈謎):

http://blog.nciku.com/blog/en/2011/09/14/nciku-quiz-chinese-character-riddles/

I got 9 out of 10, they are fairly easy even for beginners. Most lantern riddles are much too hard for me!