what3words
Also known as w3w, What Three Words
What3words (stylized as what3words) is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of approximately . It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words. For example, the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by ///slurs.this.shark.
Key facts
- Company.name
- What3words Limited
- Company.logo
- what3words logo.png
- Company.logo_alt
- What3words Company Logo
- Company.image
- What3Words example.svg
- Company.image_size
- 300px
- Company.image_caption
- Part of the What3Words grid on the Palace of Westminster showing typical words and their pseudorandom distribution
- Company.trading_name
- what3words
- Company.founded
- in Royston, Hertfordshire, England
- Company.location
- London, England, UK
- Company.area_served
- <!-- or:
- Company.areas_served
- -->
- Company.owner
- <!-- or:
Article
13 sectionsContents
- History
- Source of revenue
- Design
- Wordlists
- Ambiguity
- Reception
- Mountain rescue
- Other emergency services
- Proprietary
- Parody
- Awards
- See also
- References
What3words (stylized as what3words) is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of approximately . It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words. For example, the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by ///slurs.this.shark.
What3words differs from most location encoding systems in that it uses words rather than strings of numbers or letters, and the pattern of this mapping is not obvious; the algorithm mapping locations to words is copyrighted.