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AAP-77
Personnel drafting NATO documents or working inside the NATO Terminology Programme, not suppliers or contractors
AAP-77 is NATO's own manual for building and agreeing bilingual (English/French) terminology used in NATO documents; it is a house style, not a requirement any supplier implements.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AAP-77 is not something ComplyTrain, or a customer, implements. It is the house style behind the terminology that turns up inside the documents a supplier does have to meet: a STANAG, an AQAP, or another Allied Publication describing an operational procedure. Its value to a reader is in interpreting those documents correctly rather than in anything to evidence on its own account. Knowing that a NATO definition is deliberately gender-neutral, that "admitted" terminology is weaker than "preferred", or that an abbreviation exists in only one official language by design, stops a quality team from reading a drafting convention as a substantive requirement. ComplyTrain keeps AAP-77 in the standards library for exactly that: a cross-reference for teams reading NATO documents, not a control anyone holds evidence against.
What ComplyTrain does not do: it does not propose or agree NATO terminology, and it does not check a supplier's documents against this Manual's conventions. The tier of NATO documentation that actually reaches a contract, and the Allied Publications that come with it, are set by the contract and the customer's quality clause, not by this page. The standards explorer shows what else sits alongside AAP-77 in that catalogue, and we are glad to talk through what a specific contract requires.
Tell us how you need to work with AAP-77 and what you need from it. We will come back to you about what ComplyTrain can do.
Thank you. Your list is on its way to your inbox, and we will come back to you on what working with these standards in ComplyTrain involves, usually within one business day.
No. AAP-77 governs how NATO itself develops and agrees terminology; it applies, in its own words, "to all actors in the NTP and authors of NATO documents", not to suppliers. A supplier meets NATO terminology only where it has already been used to word a requirement in a contract, a STANAG or an AQAP.
It means a term, abbreviation or definition has been through the NATO Terminology Programme: proposed against this Manual's conventions, reviewed, and approved by the relevant tasking authority. It is a quality mark for NATO's own vocabulary, not a certification of any organization.
No. NATOTerm is the database of terminology NATO has agreed; AAP-77 is the manual that explains how entries in it are built and formatted. AAP-77 also states plainly that its own worked examples "do not necessarily reflect current agreed NATO terminology."
Because English and French are NATO's two official languages, and the Manual requires every piece of NATO terminology to be "developed and agreed in both official languages." Roughly half the Manual is a French-language mirror of the English drafting rules, and the two languages do not always capitalize or punctuate the same institution the same way.
No. Clause 1.3 excludes them by name: "This Manual does not address symbols, codes, formulas, icons, pictures, diagrams or other graphic representations, although they may appear in terminological entries."
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