What3Words

#1

I have been harassed by What3Words (https://what3words.com) advertising on YouTube lately, so thought I would see what my address would be. There is obviously a few choices available for my property, but my favourite is:

///phenomenally.smokeless.muscular

Yip, sounds like me!

What is your favourite 3 word place?

2 Likes
Don’t Assume My Topic Thread
#2

for work:
Capture

1 Like
#3

///tripped.unlucky.soon

What is the purpose of this?

#4

Supposedly this is easier to remember than actual GPS coordinates…

#5

Have they met me? I don’t even know gps.

#6

I can imagine me trying to explain to the delivery guy how to spell phemona… pheenomil… phynominal… Freaking meet me at the Spar.

2 Likes
#7

///immunity.arts.observes

#8

///nostra.frikken.damus :smiley:

My current favourite is ///routine.mops.repeated

Geocoding of the entire planetary surface into 3 metre squares, defined by a permanent 3 word “address”. Like they say on their site:

3 word addresses are easy to say and share, and are as accurate as GPS coordinates.
51.520847, -0.19552100 ←→ /// filled.count.soap
People use what3words to find their tents at festivals, navigate to B&Bs, and to direct emergency services to the right place.

Honestly don’t know why it hasn’t gained much traction here - it’s perfect for finding rural area locations, “unnamed street” addresses, outdoor locations, etc.

2 Likes
#9

My made up phrases aren’t working :frowning:

1 Like
#10

Oh ok, that’s pretty cool

2 Likes
#11

:joy: :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :joy:

Ok, Nostradamus, you made my day!

2 Likes
#12

typed in my home town.

Stale Palms… Classic!

1 Like
#13

The addresses aren’t randomly generated, they’re permanently allocated their specific three word combination.

The English language is composed of 171,476 words, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary. What3words removed any hyphenated words, curse words, and homophones. That left the team with 40,000 words, which composed some 64 trillion unique three-word combinations. Since the Earth has room for 57 trillion 3-meter squares on its surface, that left a few trillion extras lying around.
Source - Popular Mechanics

So unless you happen to randomly select an allocated combination of those 40 000 words, you’re probably going to get lost :slight_smile:

Here’s a quick TED Talk from one of the founders where he explains the thinking behind W3W, with lots of reference to South Africa.

#14

I was trying 3 word combinations from when I used to do tech support. Penal is a legitimate word, but I could see it not making the cut…

The phrases in question were (and yes, these were automatically generated security passwords for free trial dial-up users):
Khaki Penal Yoke
and
White Penal Fuel

Someone called up in tears wanting to change the second one, but they were permanent!

2 Likes
#15

They should have been grateful it wasn’t White Penile Fuel! :laughing:

#16

It was close enough to make 'em cry lol

1 Like
#17

This seems pretty useful.
Would have been awesome if they went with a adverb-adjective-noun structure though.

1 Like
#18

My office is scouts.torches.grownup

The entrance to the place where we had our last two meetups is home.graced.slang

1 Like