I first heard about What3Words from one of my daughters who works in Emergency Communications near Washington, DC. It seems that they are beginning to integrate this geographic coordinate system into 911 systems in order to provide yet another way to direct police and other emergency services to the correct location, whether in the city or in rural areas, which often lack street addresses.
After growing up using maps in the Boy Scouts and having served as an intelligence officer in the military, I have a fascination with mapping and geolocation. I hadn’t heard of this system and set about to learn more about it. After some research, I realized this would make a great article for others who may run across this relatively new phenomenon.
Although it’s new to me, What3Words was actually developed in 2013 in the United Kingdom. The company provides a simple explanation of what the system does:
“We divided the world into 3 metre squares and gave each square a unique combination of three words. It’s the easiest way to find and share exact locations.”
As Americans, we are all comfortable with street addresses, including ZIP codes, but once you leave the U.S., the formats used start to become confusing. For example, in Japan, street numbers aren’t assigned sequentially as you go down a street. Instead, they are assigned based upon when the building was built, with older buildings having lower numbers and the newer the building, the higher the number. This can lead to a rather exhaustive search for a particular address.
What3Words is a word-based system that divides the world into a grid of 57 trillion three-by-three-meter squares, each of which has a three-word address. Wordlists of 25,000 words are available in 50 languages to describe land locations. English, however, uses 40,000 to describe locations on land as well as sea. Interestingly, the various language word lists are not direct translations to English, as this sometimes requires more than one word. Additionally, areas with higher population density use more common words from the vocabulary.
The address of three meters squared is just shy of 10 feet by 10 feet. That’s a pretty decent size to describe a location for most applications.
If you require more precision, such as for survey or say, weapon delivery, you’ll want to use one of the more common geolocation systems like Lat Long for Latitude and Longitude. This is the system used to circumnavigate the globe centuries ago and is still used commercially by the maritime and aviation communities, as it describes locations all across the globe, including at sea, and it allows precision down to within inches. One interesting aspect of the Lat Long system is that it was developed using imperial measurements like nautical miles and feet, before the 10-based metric system was created, but is just as compatible now with the metric system. Lat Long coordinates are also used by the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) which is shared worldwide and maintained by the U.S. Space Force.
If you served in the military, you’ll be familiar with the Military Grid Reference System, which relies on a series of letters and numbers to find your exact location down to a single square meter. Naturally, like all things Cold War-related, the Russians have their own military geolocation reference system and it’s backward to ours.
Let’s examine how What3Words system works. Take for instance, one of the most famous addresses in the world, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20004 — more commonly known as the Whitehouse. Using What3Words, we get “Reduce.Dose.Begins” which is actually a three-meter square location within the famed Oval Office of the massive Whitehouse complex. Here is where we begin to understand the advantage of this coordinate system. Imagine being able to tell first responders precisely where to go within a large compound that has a single address. The system offers increased precision over street addresses and works even where there are no addresses at all.
As easy as What3Words seems to be compared to other systems, it has its critics. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Mountain Rescue in England and Wales issued a warning in 2021 about the use of the system after receiving incorrect coordinates on 45 locations over a 12-month period due to spelling errors and local accents. Oddly enough, the same issue could arise from passing the long strings of letters and numbers used with other geographic coordinate systems.
Although the company has made all efforts to avoid spelling variations and homophones, or words that sound alike, the system still has 32 homophones in its vocabulary. This could conceivably lead to location errors, but with the pseudorandom distribution of the words across the globe, it shouldn’t be an issue.
I found this complaint to be somewhat amusing. One critic was concerned about the possibility that the three-word address for areas of cultural significance might turn out to be offensive.
Probably the biggest and most acceptable criticism is that that the source code which translates the three-word designators into other geolocation systems is proprietary and not open-source, unlike every other commonly used system. This is because What3Words is not only a geolocation system but also the name of the for-profit company which developed it. They maintain intellectual property rights of their process, and business users must pay a license fee in one form or another to use their coordinate system. Individual use of downloadable phone apps is free.
However, considering it applies to everywhere, whether or not there is a street address, and is easier to understand than other geolocation systems that might require specialized tools and processes to determine locations, I suspect What3Words will catch on and become even more commonplace.
