What 3 Words?

When Chris Sheldrick started a business organizing live music events, he noticed that people got physically lost all the time. It was so common, frustrating, and bad for business – you can’t afford bands or instruments being late to gigs and festivals! – that he met up with a mathematician friend to come up with a solution.

From a daily frustration came a digital solution for organizing physical presence, now on its way to becoming a global addressing standard.

What3words is a really simple way to talk about location. They have divided the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique 3 word address. It means anyone can accurately find any location and share it more quickly, easily and with less ambiguity than any other system.

Helping Everyone Talk About Everywhere

Clearly, standard street addresses aren’t the end-all for finding physical locations. That day, Chris and his friend scribbled a new plan on a napkin – a way to identify physical locations, no street names (or streets!) required:

• Divide the world into squares, three metres by three metres.
• Randomly assign each square a combination of three dictionary words.

So, for example, if you told a friend to meet you at the Vintry, you would use ///residency.dreamer.cobs, they would be able to search a map for those three words, see that exact 3m x 3m, and know exactly where to go.