This App Gives Even the Most Remote Spots on the Planet an Address

Billions of people in the world have no physical addresses. What3Words marries math and linguistics for an elegant solution.

Problem

To give unique, accurate physical addresses to people living without them.

Solution

An app from British startup What3Words uses an algorithm to assign every 10-foot-by-10-foot square on the globe a three-word address delineated by periods. There are 57 trillion such combinations, stretching across land and sea. For example, the main entrance to New York’s American Museum of Natural History in New York is ideas.nurses.asserts. The nearby subway station is sailor.king.feast. The sophisticated, 10MB equation (small enough to be installed on a smartphone) eliminates offensive words and homophones (such as hear and here or knew and new) to avoid confusion.

Origins

When he was working as a concert organizer, Chris Sheldrick, now the company’s CEO, struggled to get equipment and bands to event locations on time due to inadequate addressing. He resorted to using GPS coordinates, says chief marketing officer Giles Rhys Jones, but that wasn’t a fool-proof system either: “It came to a head when he did a gig in Italy and all the equipment turned up one hour north of Rome, instead of one hour south, because the driver had mixed up a 4 and a 5 on the GPS coordinates.” Sheldrick sat down with a friend, mathematician Mohan Ganesalingam, to devise their own means of designating addresses, and What3Words was born.

The system’s simplicity and extreme specificity, the company claims, make it more accurate than a postal address and easier to remember, use, and share than a set of GPS digits. Although similar-sounding three-word combinations do exist, such as table.chair.lamp and table.chair.lamps, they appear on different continents, reducing the possibility of human error.

What3Words is used in more than 170 countries and available in 11 languages. If all goes according to plan, it will become a universal addressing system in every tongue.

How It Works

The company provides addresses in places where traditional addresses are nonexistent, such as Brazilian favelas, and in Mongolia, where the national post office has begun using What3Words’s system instead of house numbers and street names. According to the World Bank, nearly a quarter of the Mongolian population is nomadic. “There are four billion people in the world who don’t have an address,” Jones says. “That means that they can’t get aid, can’t vote, and are invisible to the state. That’s unacceptable.”

The system, however, isn’t just for delivering packages. It can aid emergency response in vast areas where there are no clear markings, such the outdoor Glastonbury music festival, in a Super Bowl–size stadium, and on the ski slopes of Lake Tahoe. “If you have an injury on the slopes, Jones says, it’s incredibly difficult to describe where you are. The problem with using GPS coordinates is that if I’m trying to shout 18 digits on a telephone while I’m incredibly stressed, errors creep in.” A string of three words is far easier to relay under dire circumstances.

But hyper-specific mapping also takes some of the pain out of everyday meetups, allowing users the ability to pinpoint their locations, whether they’re in a large, open field or at a building with multiple entrances. So if you want to meet avoid the hordes of tourists at the American Museum of Natural History, tell your friend to meet you at the obscure side entrance atskip.quest.boats. She can then plug that address into a navigation app that uses the What3Words API to get turn-by-turn directions.