AAP-77 NATO terminology manual

What it is

AAP-77 is the NATO Terminology Manual. It is easy to mistake for a technical requirement because it sits in the same Allied Publication series as documents that are, but it is something different: it is NATO's own house style for building and agreeing the words that appear inside its other documents. It explains the theory behind a terminological entry, sets the English and French drafting conventions a term, an abbreviation and a definition each have to follow, and gives instructions for compiling lexicons. Nothing in it is a requirement a supplier's quality system holds evidence against.

Who it actually directs

The Manual is explicit about its own scope: it "shall apply to all actors in the [NATO Terminology Programme] and authors of NATO documents." That means NATO's tasking authorities - the senior committees and working groups, such as the Committee for Standardization (CS), that sponsor a piece of terminology - the NATO Terminology Office that manages the programme centrally from NATO Headquarters, and anyone drafting NATO text. It is not addressed to a manufacturer, a supplier, a notified body or a national authority. It binds through NATO's own policy chain: the NATO Policy for Standardization, which requires NATO documents to use NATO Agreed terminology, and the NATO Terminology Directive, which this Manual implements down at the level of a single term or definition. No contract clause invokes AAP-77 the way one can invoke an AQAP.

The concept, the designation and the definition

The Manual's method starts from theory, drawn from seven ISO terminology standards. A concept is a unit of knowledge; a designation (a term, abbreviation, symbol or similar) labels it; a definition describes it. Concepts sit in families, and a concept diagram can be used to keep every definition in a family worded consistently with the others. Where more than one designation exists for a concept, each one gets an acceptability rating - preferred, admitted, deprecated or obsolete - and every rating has to be listed on the proposal form itself, not buried in a note, so a search for any of the names finds the same record. NATO terminology is developed and agreed in both English and French, and the Manual has its own rule for gender-neutral drafting in each language, with worked "wrong versus right" examples for both.

Building the term, the abbreviation and the definition

For a term, the Manual sets a search order before anyone invents a new one: NATO sources first, then the Concise Oxford English Dictionary or Le Petit Robert de la langue française, then international, regional, national or private-sector standards bodies, in that order. A usable term has to be transparent, concise, stable (a well-known but technically outdated name like SHAPE is kept rather than corrected), consistent with existing NATO Agreed vocabulary, and free of an abbreviation or subject-field label folded into it. Abbreviations follow the same sourcing order and are optional; the Manual recognises initialisms, acronyms, shortenings and mixed forms as true abbreviations, and treats short forms and clipped terms as ordinary synonyms instead.

The definition is the part with the most rules, because it is written as a single sentence: an optional qualifier, a superordinate term, then the characteristics that distinguish the concept from its neighbours. The Manual names six recurring faults by name - incomplete, over-restrictive, circular, negative, hidden inside another entry, or smuggling in policy and procedure instead of describing what the concept simply is - and tests a candidate definition by substitution, swapping it back into a real sentence to see whether the sentence still makes sense. A definition may not carry an abbreviation beyond a short agreed list (NATO, EU and a handful of others), a mathematical symbol, or punctuation such as brackets, quotation marks, colons or semicolons. Every entry records where it came from: a dictionary and edition, a civil standard, or the tasking authority that approved it when nothing else applied.

Style and capitalization, in two languages

Chapter 4 is a long, worked reference: British spelling to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the unhyphenated form of a compound where the dictionary allows both, "-ize" rather than "-ise", numerals spelled out below ten, SI units by default, and no mathematical symbols in running prose. English and French each get their own detailed capitalization rules covering proper nouns, institutions, titles, treaties and military units, and the two languages frequently disagree on whether the same body is capitalized.

What the Manual leaves out

Clause 1.3 is direct about the boundary: "This Manual does not address symbols, codes, formulas, icons, pictures, diagrams or other graphic representations, although they may appear in terminological entries." And the worked examples scattered through the Manual - the sample definitions of "dog", "rifle" and the rest - are teaching aids only: the Manual says plainly that they "do not necessarily reflect current agreed NATO terminology." Neither is something to read as an actual NATOTerm entry.

How the Manual is enforced

There is no audit, inspection or certification here, and none is implied by the fact that this is an Allied Publication. Oversight is entirely internal to NATO: the NATO Terminology Office manages the programme centrally, and a tasking authority reviews and approves the entries it sponsors before they gain "NATO Agreed" status in NATOTerm. That is quality control over NATO's own vocabulary, not an assessment of a company, a product or a management system.